How Do You Share Documents?

This is one of those "There really should be an easy, obvious, and good way to do it, but I don't know what it is" things.  If you have documents that need to be worked on by multiple people, how what tools/technologies do you use?

If the documents need to be shared just among staff members?

If the documents need to be shared between staff members and the congregation?

If the documents need to be shared between staff members and vendors?

If the documents need to be shared among any ad-hoc group of people?

Email is the obvious (and usually bad) way to do this -- it's not really collaborative.  SharePoint would seem to be an answer, but SharePoint keeps seeming to be an answer, but then keeps missing the mark.  Maybe Basecamp or Backpack would be better answers.  Or Google Apps.

So...anybody out there have an answer they're happy with?

PS:  having a great technology that people forget to use doesn't count!

Comments

[Derek Schwab]

We're in the process of implementing Sharepoint, which will be connected to the outside world via ISA server for all of the above. Not sure it's the perfect answer, but it seems to be pretty close.

[DerekM]

We are pretty seriously looking at Microsoft Groove right now. It has some pretty cool features. But, the big problem that I have seen with technologies that try to do this sort of thing (FolderShare, Groove, etc.) is what happens when two (or more) people try to access the same file at the same time. You end up with two copies of the file that then need to be merged somehow. I guess this is where SharePoint has a leg up... being able to 'check out' files. But, like you said, SharePoint just isn't quite baked yet. It still seems like it needs way too much support (for me anyway...)