Using google docs/apps for collaborative file-store?

[d000hg]

Looking for a easy solution to let clients supply useful docs for us to see, etc. We were thinking something like drop-box since it can synchronise folders, etc. But wondered if g-apps might work too, since client is keen on using g-apps generally.
Certainly you can upload docs (or any files) and share them; however I don't know if they make it easy to use it for maintaining an offline folder, uploading a whole directory of files, etc.
Lots of docs are PDFs which is neat for online-viewing, but we don't want to convert the docs to g-doc format, rather use g-docs to store the files.

Has anyone tried using it for this?

[xchaotic]

Most of the features you want work.
But if PDF is a major part of your workflow try Acrobat.com AcrobatX etc - i.e. all that Adobe collab stuff that even let's you annotate your PDFs and record your *sigh* at the same time...

[yorkshireman]

Google Apps is good. Look at Basecamp too.

We use Google Apps extensively and it works well (and is free too!)

If the information you are sharing is project related then I would also consider Basecamp

That is a really cool tool for sharing project info including docs under version control. You have to pay after the 30 day free trial though.

[d000hg]

We've already got Jira and forums and SVN for internal stuff, this is more a way to share a folder with a client. g-docs wouldn't be my preferred choice since it doesn't appear to have offline sync options like DropBox, but since we use it anyway, there are benefits to not using yet another tool.

[gingerjedi]

A bit off topic but I've found google docs to be invaluable to convert various formats, just upload one format and download in another.

Saves farting around with various pluggins just for a one off.