AKA: “What do you MEAN you didn’t GET IT?!? The memo’s ONLINE!”
Smallbiztechnology.com has a short article up (here) about online collaboration suites, listing a few worthy of trying out. Oddly, Google Apps is not listed – and as (I would believe) the largest of the online office packages, I would think they’d be included. Google Apps also offers their enterprise version free to nonprofits, and has a ton of great features for collaboration.
Of course, if you’re not using one, and you have a staff of greater than, well, one – you probably should be. These suites give you a place to store (and sometimes edit) documents, spreadsheets, presentations, files, contacts, and more (features vary from suite to suite though). The real value though comes when you add in the fact that you can share all those files with others, even editing the same document at the same time (Google Apps at least does that). No more emailing documents around, or backing up a bunch of different files while worrying if you have the latest versions. And each has it’s own mix of other features, like task tracking and assignment, email, and calendar integration. These are great not just for staff, though; committee heads and other volunteers could be given access as well.
Some are free, some have limited free accounts with a set number of users, and some are a monthly fee. Try a few and see which offer the features you think you could get the most use out of. Besides the others in that posting, any others come to mind? And what is the killer feature YOU want in an office suite?