Monday.com brings document editing to project management

Monday.com has incorporated a document editing tool into its project management platform, saying the offering will improve real-time collaboration and information sharing within a company.

The company today released workdocs, claiming it is more fit for tasks like brainstorming than word processors like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Workdocs comes with Monday.com subscriptions -- including the free tier -- for no additional charge.

Tal Haramati, Monday.com's tech lead, said workdocs allows hundreds of employees to edit a document simultaneously. The company said it has taken pains to ensure that this does not lead to confusion -- for instance, when an employee hits "undo," it reverses his or her last action, not the last action performed on the document. The simultaneous editing feature makes the product useful for tasks like brainstorming sessions, setting goals and following the progress of a project.

Workers can embed widgets -- including calendars, to-do lists and charts -- into workdocs, and those elements update in real time. For example, an employee could add a graph based on Salesforce data. When that data is updated in Salesforce, the change will be reflected in the workdocs document.

"If you add a chart to your doc, it's not a screenshot of a chart -- it's an actual chart," Haramati said. "When something updates behind the scenes, it will be updated on your doc as well."

Employees can also edit Monday.com elements such as Gantt charts and project management boards from within workdocs and see those changes carry over.

Documents can be private to a certain user or group, or accessible to everyone within an organization. The document's owner can also invite people from outside a company to edit it as guests.

Other workdocs collaboration capabilities include the ability to tag co-workers, create annotations, turn text into an action item on a project-management board and add images and videos to a document.  

Haramati said workdocs was a good complement to Monday's work management platform, Work OS. While the company's offerings have previously focused on organizing data, many people think of work in terms of words. Haramati said Monday wanted to accommodate that way of working.

"Our clients usually manage a lot of aspects of their work using docs," he said. "It's pretty obvious why: We're people. We think with language. We communicate with language."

Technalysis Research founder Bob O'Donnell said enterprises want collaborative capabilities in their document editors, but Monday.com faces stiff competition from established players in the market.

"There are so many alternatives from big players like Microsoft and Google that they could find adoption to be limited," he said.

Mike Gleason is a reporter covering unified communications and collaboration tools. He previously covered communities in the MetroWest region of Massachusetts for the Milford Daily News, Walpole Times, Sharon Advocate and Medfield Press. He has also worked for newspapers in central Massachusetts and southwestern Vermont and served as a local editor for Patch. He can be found on Twitter at @MGleason_TT.