Note: For many years, I've been an avid follower and contributor to outlinersoftware.com, an online forum on (mainly) personal information management software solutions. I'll be re-posting here some of my own contributions to that forum which I believe have a longer term value, always linking back to the original submissions for anyone who wants to follow the full discussions.
Hereby my conclusion from a recently discussed issue: what is the most convenient way to work on a large and complex document with several collaborators, giving them easy access to the specific chapters that interest them, while still maintaining an overview?
The way I see it, there are two ways to go:
(1) Use a tool providing collaboration features and including the full content. Onenote with Skydrive or Sharepoint seem to be the most mature solutions in this area. Free/open source alternatives include wikis, multi-author Wordpress and possibly more specialised tools like Scenari
(2) “Render unto caesar what is caesar’s” by using a tool for the overview and another for the broken-down content. I believe that this approach has its benefits, the main one being that collaborators don’t need to learn a completely new tool, as they will do their editing in Word or Google Docs (though it will probably have to be one or the other if they share chapters among them). The individual documents would be hosted in Dropbox, Wuala or similar synchronised storage.
For the overview, an online tool like MindMeister/Mind42 or the excellent MyInfo website export should prove intuitive enough for most. The former would be preferable if collaboration is required on the actual outline, whereas the latter would be read/only (for everyone but the project manager).
