When discussing about a specific Office 2.0 service, I often make the distinction between ‘publishing’ a document and ’sharing’ a document. Some readers have recently asked questions about how they differ from each other, and I thought that some clarification would be welcome. The main difference between publishing and sharing is that publishing makes a document public to anyone who is connected to the Internet, while sharing makes this document available to a selected audience only.

In the old days, you could publish a document by uploading it onto a public website, while sharing a document would typically be done by attaching it to an email you would send to the people you would want to share the document with, or by uploading it onto a password-protected website and sending the password by email to the aforementioned group of people.

With good Office 2.0 tools such as Zoho Writer, you click on the ‘Publish’ button to make a document public, or you click on the ‘Share’ button and enter a list of email adresses to share the same document with a selected group of people only. The personal biography I use for speaking engagements or press articles was published that way for example.

What’s interesting with this approach is that you can easily add or remove people you share a document with, by simply adding or removing them from a list. This solves the issue of having to re-issue new passwords when you wanted to remove someone from the group of people you shared a password-protected page with. Also, when developing documents that will eventually be published on the web after being reviewed by a group, you can start by sharing the document with that group, then publish it, without having to move the document around. As a result, simple document publishing workflow processes get streamlined without having to invest in a complex content management system.