Even better collaboration in Google Docs with Discussions

If you, like me, liked Google Wave and desperately wanted it to be more useful in a practical way, it looks like some of that functionality has found its way into Google Docs and it looks pretty exciting from a collaboration perspective.

I don’t use Google Docs much, its a lot more constrained than Word and even more constrained than some of my alternative word processors but this sort of functionality makes it a lot more useful. Collaborating on a document can be a pain and the best solution I have come across so far for me is sharing documents in Dropbox and working on them asynchronously.

Discussions in Google Docs seem to integrate with email responses when comments are sent to participants by email and work very much like Wave on Docs itself. What Google Docs really needs now is that offline capability HTML 5 promises and Docs starts to become a viable desktop word processor for people who are not online all the time.