One of the easiest ways to collaborate with a business partner or colleague is to e-mail a document to them, but it is also one of the hardest habits to break too. And while e-mail is so pervasive and nearly instantaneous, the notion of serial collaboration–I work on the document, send it to you and you work on it and send it back–is clumsy. The attached documents can clog up e-mail systems or get rejected by filters. If more than two people are working on it, someone has to be in charge of resolving conflicts.

There are better ways and I will show you a few alternatives in my column this week in PC World.