Google Office (http://docs.google.com/) was just opened to the public today. It seems to support Both Google's Spreadsheet and "Word-like" applications in a tight package.
I had used the spreadsheet before, but not the documents part of the site. While Google’s Doc Application lacks many of Microsoft Word’s features, it includes several features that are hard to use in Word.
1. Past versions of Google Docs are saved automatically and easily accessible. You can even have Google show you the differences between versions.
2. Google Docs allows you two save your document as a PDF without extra software.
3. I have not tested it yet, but the colaortation feature looks a lot like Google spreadsheets. So you should be able to collaborate on the same document at the same time with other Google users.
4. Google Doc’s native format seems to be HTML and they allow the export (to a ZIP), edit, and publish (on Blogger or as a stand alone URL) that HTML.
Dr. Weinberg and I checked out the collaboration part of the Google Doc site. It is not quite as cool as the collaboration in Google Spreadsheets. This is because it lacks a chat feature (that we could find anyway) and we were not quite sure what rules it was following to decide whose concurrent changes would apply. However, it still shows who is working on a document and it updates the document on the fly.