At work I am involved in producing the Annual Report for a government owned trading enterprise. This is a task that requires the participation of people from all divisions in
the company, and a highly iterative process that goes through numerous ad-hoc revisions
until the final product emerges.

This type of work is perfectly suited to the type of collaboration software that has been
emerging over the past few years.
Back in December 2006 I asked my IT division if I could use Confluence for the project.
It provided an externally hosted, web based wiki type program with excellent version control and the ability to instantly see who had made changes to what. The software is developed and hosted in Australia, is open source, so you can make your own changes if you wish, and has an active user community providing further functionality through a wide variety of plug-ins.
Its access control at the page or document level is limited, but this was not important to me.

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