AbiWord is a light weight, open source word processor for Windows and Linux that can create and edit documents in a variety of formats including DOC, RTF, TXT, HTML, and ABW. The word processor is often overlooked in favor of the fuller featured OpenOffice.org.

But if you don't need a full office suite that takes up hundreds of megaybtes, AbiWord is worth checking out -- and the latest version released today includes a handful of interesting new features including integration with the new AbiCollab web-based service for sharing documents with friends, colleagues, or the general public (you can set your account to be publicly visible or private).

AbiWord 2.8 includes a number of new collaborative features including the ability to highlight text from different authors in different colors. You can also upload documents to AbiCollab.net, where you can store files, share them with contacts, and convert from one file format to another. You can't actually edit documents on AbiCollab.net, so it's not exactly a Google Docs killer. But you can create a document which users can then download and edit with AbiWord before saving and/or uploading their changes. And when you open a file from AbiCollab, it will automatically open in AbiWord on your desktop. When you hit save, it will be saved to the web.

The latest version of AbiWord also supports multi-page views, annotations, or comments in documents and scalable vector graphics. There's also improved support for ODT and DOCX documents.

I noticed this function a while ago when I upgraded to Photoshop CS4 -- I never dared use it, but I did notice it!

Now there's a handy little video from Adobe that shows you exactly how to enable the free screen sharing available to you in their latest suite of tools.

You're probably thinking: Neat! But what can I actually do with it? The first thing that comes to my mind is for businesses that are using an external graphic designer -- want to see their current progress on some work? Want to make sure they're sticking to the draft? Use the screen sharing!

You could also use it for collaboration -- there is chat and video conferencing functionality included. You could suggest changes and watch them occur in real time. I can just see it now... 'No, no, move it a bit to the left. That's it! Up a bit! How about if you make it luminous pink? And the font slightly more interesting... how about Comic Sans?'

Although Zoho offers a suite of apps that competes with Google Apps, there's no reason for them to let the huge Google Apps userbase slip through their fingers when it comes to project management. Zoho Projects, the planning and collaboration web app from Zoho, now integrates with Google Apps. You can now sign into Zoho Projects with your Google Apps login, and plug your Google Docs right into Zoho.

That's not all, though. When you schedule deadlines and milestones in Zoho Projects, you can export them automatically to Google Calendar. There's also an OpenSocial widget for Zoho Projects, so you can put Zoho Projects into Gmail or on your iGoogle homepage. It seems less like Zoho is importing your Google data, and more like it's becoming the missing project management app that Google Apps doesn't have.

Remember the other day when I said I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the security providers join forces for the greater good?

Sophos' Graham Cluely has this morning announced the formation of the Industry Connections Security Group under the umbrella of the IEEE Standards Association's Industry Connections program. Initially the group includes Sophos, Microsoft, Symantec, McAfee, AVG, and Trend Micro.

While Cluely states that the security providers shared information in the past, he adds that it's been in a mostly "Here's a truckload of new malware samples, enjoy!" kind of way. One of the primary objectives of the ICSG is to standardize how information is shared and to develop "an electronic delivery mechanism that not only shares the malware samples, but can also include useful information such as the website where the samples were found."

The IEEE's ICSG website notes that while the bad guys have been doing this for ages - sharing toolkits and other code freely - the security providers have mostly been operating in isolation.

Now that they're organizing, here's hoping the collaboration can make a difference in the battle against malware.

Sometimes, the best people for a job can't all assemble in the same physical location. That's not a problem when everyone's working independently, but even the best remote coworkers sometimes need to have a meeting. Team Apart makes that possible, with really simple real-time collaboration features including audio/video chat and whiteboarding.

It's easy to invite people to your Team Apart workspace. In fact, you just have to send them the URL. Once everybody's in the room, you can chat via webcam and take notes on a shared real-time notepad. You can also share photos and documents, and Team Apart will store them in your virtual workspace. Team Apart is still in beta, with limited invitations available, but it looks like a simple and effective solution to some of the problems of remote collaboration.

Because I work almost exclusively in remote-based teams, I'm always looking for new tools and services that can help me manage my daily tasks and effectively collaborate with my team members. One of the biggest problems I have with some collaboration systems is that they require everyone to login and collaborate using the web app itself. This is great if you are always in one place or in a more traditional office environment, but it becomes less problematic if you are on the go frequently and already have tools and practices in place to try to manage your life.

This is why I think that WizeHive has real potential. WizeHive was launched in late 2008 after its founders, who were unsatisfied with the current crop of web-based collaboration and task management tools, decided to scratch their own itch and launch their own service. Over the last six months, WizeHive has rolled out additional features and today, WizeHive is releasing a bevy of new features and enhancements with the aim of bring WizeHive to the masses.

I talked to WizeHive's co-founder, Mike Levinson on Monday about the product and its development and what the new release brings to the table. I was most impressed that Mike and his team use WizeHive internally to manage various projects and activities not just including WizeHive's development, but for other business tasks as well.

After playing with WizeHive a bit, I think the best way to describe the service would be that it is Basecamp meets Backpack, with a dash of Yammer on the side. Unlike some collaboration solutions like Box.net, which really do an excellent job of replicating or replacing SharePoint, WizeHive is a more streamlined way to share files and communicate details back and forth, or to keep track of task management.

After creating a WizeHive account, you can create a different workspace for various teams or projects you might be working on. Within that workspace, you can choose who you invite to collaborate in that space. Once you have invited someone to your space, they can share documents with you, make comments, assign or complete tasks, etc.

You can also create pages within a workspace to further drill down your focus. In my DLS (for DownloadSquad) workspace for instance, I can have pages for Posts, Features and Ideas. Each page can contain its own task and its own set of comments.

The thing I like best about WizeHive is how easily it integrates with other services. You can create a new task (or even a new page) using e-mail, but you can also send messages, tasks and reminders using Twitter. By sending a direct message to @wizehive, after your account is verified, you can communicate directly with your workspace and the people in your group will get notifications and can reply by e-mail, Twitter or using the web site.

Here are some of the new features WizeHive has introduced with this release:

• improved UI for tracking and managing a large numbers of shared files
• enhanced file management and version control
• an increase in the number of files that can be uploaded at one time to 50
• bump in the maximum uploaded file size to 100 MB
• embedded image viewer
• streamlined collaborative editing of documents and spreadsheets

Although you can create and edit documents using ZoHo (it is integrated) and you can save revisions, the real focus of WizeHive seems to be on tasks and communication.

WizeHive is still in beta, so you can sign-up for a free account with unlimited users. You're limited to 50MB of storage space (an additional 3GB is $8US a month), but you get every other feature and you can use the service at least until the end of 2009. Personal accounts, limited to 3 users and 50MB of space are also free. Teams or Small Businesses can get an account with support for 10 users and 3GB of storage for $39 a month.

I'm going to give WizeHive a try and see how well I can integrate it into my life.

Open Atrium is a new open-source "team portal" that looks like it's going to be running a lot of intranets in the near future. It comes with six basic features: a blog, a wiki, a calendar, a to do list, a shoutbox, and a dashboard. You can also create smaller groups within your team, and they'll each have members-only versions of those features. That's pretty useful, but where Atrium separates itself from the pack of other offerings out there is in the ability to build your own features.

It looks like the folks behind Open Atrium are pushing to create a feature-developer community, where people can build and share features for everyone to take advantage of. If you've always felt like every collaboration option out there was missing one feature or another, Atrium might be able to scratch that itch. My favorite basic feature is the iGoogle-like dashboard, which looks like the glue that holds all the other parts together. On the technical side of things, the core of Atrium is Drupal, and also uses PHP, Apache and MySQL.

Jake is a cross-platform collaborative file-sharing client that lets you create a folder and keep it synced for everyone you invite. It's built on open-source tools like Jabber, and seems to have a lot of features going for it. You can't really beat it for ease of use: setup is just adding a folder and inviting people, with no server-side fiddling to do. Even better, you can set Jake up on your intranet if you want to use it for work-related purposes.

The main difference between Jake and similar solutions like Dropbox is that Jake doesn't store files on a central server in the cloud. It just uses Jabber, XMPP and other open-source tools to sync the folder for users when they're online. Although Jake saves a log of the changes users make to the folder, it doesn't back up old versions of the data - again, no central server. This makes it slightly less powerful than some other, similar file-sharing services, but it makes setup a lot easier.

There are plenty of complex, feature-rich collaboration systems out there, but the web developers at Tgethr found that they weren't using all those extras. When it came down to it, all of their collaboration was happening over email, and Tgethr is just a way to make that email system work better. Start a new group with its own @tgethr.com email address, and Tgethr can encrypt and archive all the messages sent to that address online for easy reading.

The cool thing about Tgethr is that it's not really another service to use and commit to. You can respond quickly to the group by using your email client, and all the messages wind up in your inbox. Attachments get saved and linked, so you can download them from the web instead of having them sit in the individual inboxes of people in the group. If you're looking for a simple, sensible way to do email groups, Tgethr is a good bet.

A couple of years ago, there was a site called ficlets, a home for collaborative fiction stories put together in super-short 1024-character bursts. Ficlets was great, because anybody could jump in and add to a story in no time at all, and some interesting work grew out of it. When Ficlets disappeared, the active community it left behind had no place to go.
Until now. Ficly, from the creators of Ficlets, is like an updated, upgraded version of the original idea.

To participate, you just have to log in with Google, Yahoo!, Facebook or OpenID, then find a story and write a prequel or a sequel in 1024 characters. Your piece doesn't have to stand alone, it could just flesh out a character or place, or start a new scene for someone else to finish. I'm looking forward to reading some of the stuff coming out of Ficly, and speculating that maybe the evolution of print-on-demand services will play well with it. It would be too cool to have a long story you helped write shipped to your door in book form.

Over the past few months, storage and collaboration service Box.net has really ramped up its focus on adding tools and services that can help small and large businesses be more productive. With full-text search, enhanced collaboration tools, and a web-based document creation, the service is a really slick way for a business or group of collaborators to work together, regardless of physical location. Today, Box.net is adding a few more features, including tasks, the ability to create global folders and enhanced custom branding.

The new tasks feature lets you create a task for a new or existing file and then assign that task to a member of your group or to yourself. So if you have a document that needs a bunch of iterations done before it is submitted for final approval, you can create tasks for what needs to be accomplished and then assign them to various members of your team. You'll get an e-mail notification when you are assigned a task, and tasks also appear in the info bar on the right side of your Box.net page.

Global folders is a really, really cool new feature that lets you turn any folder into a web page with a static address that anyone can access and view. I created this page for my test in about two seconds. Every additional file I upload to that Box.net folder is added to the page, which is then viewable by anyone. If you have a lot of non-sensitive information that you want to share with a group, this is a really cool way to do it, because the people who access the information don't even need to be logged into Box.net to access or download the files.

For Business edition users, there are now custom branding tools, so that you can change the Box.net UI to include your company logo, colors and other information. This makes it really easy to use Box.net as a white-label type of solution, with the added benefit of being able to interact with other Box.net users from across the globe.

The tasks and global folders features are available to all Box.net users, including the free Lite plan. If you want custom branding, you need to be a Business edition subscriber.

Last week file sharing service drop.io launched a new real-time feature that allow users to chat with one another at a drop site. Today the company is fleshing out the real-time features by adding support for free conference calls. This means you can set up a virtual space for a conference at a moment's notice, chat with participants, talk on the phone, record or listen to voicemails, and share files all from one location.

Here's how it works. Just hop on over to conference.io and name your chat room. If you want to add any files you can do it here, but you don't have to. Click the drop it button and you're good to go. You can set an administrator password for the room, but again you don't have to.

Conference.io isn't the first service available that lets you set up a web-based chat room in a matter of seconds. But it's the first one that I'm aware of that also supports file uploads, embedding images in chat, and telephone conference calling.

We've covered Box.net before -- the file storage site with collaborative tools and a really great iPhone app -- today the company has launched a redesigned site and even more tools to make online collaboration easier and more effective.

Last year, Box.net added the ability to let users invite other collaborators to view or edit documents. Coupled with Box.net's OpenBox platform, you have a really slick light content management system that allows you to store, share, and group edit documents, spreadsheets, images and more. Today, even more features have been added to aid in project and team management.

Some of the highlights:

• Profile pages for each user that can be customized to show their role in the current project and their contact information and recent project activity
• Discussions that can take place across your shared workspace. You can also comment on individual files
• Bookmarks -- it sounds simple, but it's actually pretty cool because you can share a URL and the rest of the group can then comment on it and its findings.
• Updates - you can see updates across all your various projects to see what the newest discussions, edits and uploads are, all from one page.