The Portable Office: Work Anywhere

it lets you do all that with nothing more than your favorite browser. With an online office suite, you never have to worry about software licensing, shared network drives, or passing multiple revisions back and forth as e-mail attachments; your team members edit the document in a single place, and everyone's revisions are tracked for easy inspection and rollback.

Google Docs also integrates nicely with Gmail (so, for example, if you send a Microsoft Word attachment via e-mail, you can open it in Google Docs just by clicking on it once in Gmail).

Documentation: MediaWiki

Just as Wikipedia enables thousands of strangers to collaboratively document the world's collective knowledge, MediaWiki--the software that powers Wikipedia--can do the same for your workgroup and its collective knowledge.

The Lifehacker team wiki, located at a private URL, is where we maintain in-house writing style guides, lists of shared user names and passwords, software license codes, story pitches and research, and production guidelines. Compared with Google Docs, it's better for documents that will stick around for a while than it is for short-term projects. We aren't actively editing wiki pages every day; sometimes a week or more passes without an edit. But whenever we decide on a new process, we document it in the wiki. That way we're all on the same page, knowledgewise. The wiki has been a priceless resource for veterans and new hires alike.

All the pages inside a wiki are linked, which makes browsing and searching easier. The wiki software makes it easy to see who made certain revisions, and lets you roll back and compare page changes. You can also keep up with wiki edits via an RSS feed.

MediaWiki isn't a hosted application; you have to download it and set it up on a server of your own. If messing with PHP and MySQL is not your cup of tea, try the BitNami installer. If you're interested in a hosted wiki, check out PBwiki.

Project Manager: Backpack

We track all our in-house projects with Backpack. Made by the same folks who built Campfire--and integrated with Campfire for project-related chats--Backpack offers a simple interface for scheduling and assigning project milestones, posting questions and updates on a message board, and assigning tasks to team members.

For example, we develop small-scale software utilities such as Firefox extensions and scripts. Backpack helps us keep track of what's in progress and how far along it is.

Bookmark Manager: Del.icio.us

With a social-bookmarking service like del.icio.us, co-workers can share bookmarks with each other using tags. Finding and sharing good Web links is what we do. So finding a way to share new links--without interrupting the entire team with an e-mail or IM every time we come across a good one--is crucial. Instead, we save it in the social bookmarking service del.icio.us. (Lifehacker's publishing company, Gawker Media, uses social bookmarking service Wists to do the same thing.)

Whenever one of us finds something that's relevant on the Web, we add it to del.icio.us with a unique in-house tag. The rest of us subscribe to that tag's RSS feed, so we can peruse the recommended links at our leisure from our newsreaders. In essence, the bookmark tag acts as a low-overhead company blog. We also use the site's for: tag--any bookmark that I tag with for:ginatrapani will show up in my Links For You area.

[Gina Trapani is the lead editor of Lifehacker .com and the author of Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better (Wiley, 2008).]