5 Document Collaboration Tools for the iPad

Continuing our series on iPad apps for work, today we’ll look at document collaboration tools for the iPad.

First of all, the iPad isn’t great for this. As Instapaper creator Marco Arment, wrote recently: “The iPad isn’t really a great ‘office productivity’ device, in the traditional PC sense. It can be used that way in some cases, but it’s rarely the best tool for the job.” That said, there are a few apps that enable you to view, edit and share documents using the iPad.

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With one exception, we decided to keep this list limited to apps that have editing and sharing capabilities, so certain popular apps like Dropbox, GoodReader and WatchDox weren’t included.

Box

Box recent released a new version of its file sharing and document collaboration app for iPad. Box gives you 5GB of storage space for free, as well as tools for editing documents and commenting on them.

Google Docs

Google added editing features for its mobile version last year and it works well on the iPad. You can check out our hands-on test of it here.

The downside is that you won’t have offline access to your documents, but it does use HTML5’s offline storage feature to avoid losing work in case you lose a signal.

iWork

iWork is Apple’s own iPad-optimized document suite: Pages, Numbers and Keynote.

iWork is obviously very Apple-centric, but it can save in Microsoft Office formats, and you can share files to the public Web via iWork.com for maximum compatibility.

MangoSuite

We’ve covered MangoSpring‘s MangoSuite a few times in the past. This is the one that doesn’t support document editing. You can download, upload and view documents. But you’ll need to use another editor, like Pages or QuickOffice, to edit your documents. So why did we include it?

Because you can leave comments, have real time chats and get notifications about document changes from within the application. These are excellent features for collaboration, so we think it’s worth noting.

QuickOffice

QuickOffice is a popular mobile office suite. It works with Google Docs, Dropbox, Huddle and other file sharing platforms and can share files on Slideshare, Scribd and Docstoc.

Which One is Best?

Discuss