[I've asked for editing rights to the test documents for this Thing. But it looks like some people have had trouble accessing the documents even with permission, and I'm not sure when the permission will come through, so I'm going ahead with what I already know.]
My experience with online collaboration has been recent, but positive. I'm in a class this summer, and last week we had a group paper and presentation due. What with jobs, family commitments, school, etc., my group of four was finding it almost impossible to find a time when we could all meet. I was not looking forward to emailing a document back and forth. And then another group member suggested we do the project on Google Docs. It was easy to get all of us editing rights. We worked on our sections of the paper separately, uploaded them to Google Docs, and then one of us pulled the whole thing together and made it hand-in-able. In addition, we also used the Presentation module (Google's equivalent to PowerPoint) to make slides for the presentation. While we didn't take the time to use Presentation's templates so our presentation was a bit on the bare bones side, the basics were there and it worked smoothly on the classroom computer, which doesn't always happen when you're trying to run a PowerPoint presentation off your flash drive.
Collaborative documents is a Web 2.0 innovation that I can see many uses for and which could make life easier. And it seems to be taking off: I got an email from Microsoft inviting me to try Microsoft Office Live Workspace, which I gather is their attempt to catch up in this area.
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