No, IIRC Google bought a company that created a collaborative online Docs app, and turned it into Google Docs.
I had a very hot, fast paced project with a team of about a dozen or so engineers working on a long list of issues that the customer hired us to fix before a major product launch. The team was not all located in one spot. It was a large, sprawling industrial complex, and they were spread all over.
The initial list was over three hundred problems, and they kept piling up new ones as they discovered them.
The priority for fixing these problems kept changing daily as they were adjusting their plans, finding new issues, and some of the problems getting too much executive attention.
Every issue was accompanied with a long list of notes, changes, and directions.
So, here's the problem. How do you (a) distribute the work between people as soon as they become available, without any delays (b) keep track of progress (c) keep track of notes and changes for each item (that only the engineer currently working on that issue has a comprehensive understanding of, and they don't have any time to sit in meetings with you) and (c) report accurate, real-time project status to the customer every morning and on demand.
So, as a project manager, I would bear the brunt of this work. However, maintaining and updating this list having to chase people around would be a full time job, and I still had my main job responsibilities. So I would have to dedicate an engineer to doing nothing else but chasing people down and updating the master issues log. Even if I used the lowest rate person, it would still be a pretty sizable hit on project funding - 18 weeks x 40 hrs + up to 20 hrs of overtime each week, that's roughly the equivalent of 900-1,100 hours. And engineers, even the lowest paid ones, are expensive. On top of that, I would still, inevitably, have to spend quite a bit of my own time to make sure that this log was correct and up to date.
So, it was obvious that the best solution was to set up a shared spreadsheet that the team could be working on simultaneously in real time without stepping on each other's toes.
At first I was thinking about using Google Sheets, But we did not have a business account with Google, and getting one and having access approved by IT security would be too much hassle and couldn't happen quickly enough.
Then I learned that MS Office 2021 had collaboration features.
So I set up an Excel workbook on Onedrive, put the issues list in it, added a few columns, and granted access to the whole team. Every engineer would "check out" an issue by placing a checkmark, their initials and a date in the right columns, update status and notes as they worked on it, and then move out to the next available issue based on priority. If someone needed to switch to another issue (e.g. the priorities changed, or help was needed elsewhere) they would "check in" the one they were working on so someone else could pick it up in the meantime.
All I had to do with this log was updating priorities as they changed, adding new issues, and getting the latest project status every morning - which was easy to do because the log was being updated real time. All of the issue status tracking was done by the people who worked on them.
It was great - it helped to keep the project costs down, maintain a smooth flow of work assignments, have up to date status of every task and project overall at any point in the project, and (very important for me) kept my stress levels lower. It also worked out great for the team as everyone knew what was going on, where to find information, who was working on what, who would soon become available if help was needed, and so on.
Of course this was possible because it was a team of self-driven, responsible adults who knew what they were doing.
This worked so well that I've been using this approach on every project since then. Now this is all built into Teams and Sharepoint and is a whole lot easier to access.
