The ability to easily share documents with others is one of the great features you get with Office 2.0, as described in this past article. Problem is, it works by sending an email to the person you want to share a document with, and that email can get canned by a spam filter, or simply ignored by people who are not familiar with the mechanism. This happened to me recently when sharing a document with Zoho Writer.

There are a couple of things that can be done to work around this problem: First, service providers such as Zoho could make the email notification more personal, using the author’s email address instead of a generic one for example. Second, before sharing a document with someone for the first time, it’s not a bad idea to send an email to that person first, explaining how the sharing protocol works, while letting her know that you’re about to share a document with her. Next time you share an document with the same person, she is likely to be more familiar with the process and should not need any advance notice. And if you’re too busy to explain how the whole thing works, just copy this URL.

The solutions I offer are not perfect though, therefore I recorded this issue into my Office 2.0 bug tracker. We will see if it can be fixed before the end of the year. In the meantime, many thanks to Ross for having pointing this issue out to me during last week’s Open Source Business Conference.

UPDATE 07/11/2006: Bug fixed!