There are two things I really like about iWork ’09. The outliner in Pages and iWork.com. The later suits me very well indeed. I find myself doing quite a lot of collaborative projects. The last one I did I used Google Docs. While Google Docs gives 100% editability to all participants the actual Google Doc that is produced is not very pretty. I would then have to create something nice from this.
With iWork.com the uploaded document is not editable like a Google Doc, but rather participants can leave comments on it. This is fine by me because that is all that is required. However the actual document is a very nice looking thing. It is much easier for me to update the nice looking iWork document with the contents of the comments by the others, rather than convert a Google Doc into something presentable.
For those that are creating newsletters and that kind of thing with Pages iWork.com would be really a fabulous thing to have.
I have one concern about the iWork.com which is the email that is automatically sent out to the invited participants. This is an HTML email with a link embedded in a graphic to open the iWork.com document in their browser. The problem is that if they are using a plain text only email client then I suspect they are going to be receiving an incomprehensible mess. The actual link is shown at the bottom of the email that is sent but it is approximately one mile long. There doesn’t seem to be any Plain Text Alternative included with the outgoing email. What I’d like to see is a plain text alternative with a short link that would not be in risk of having line breaks inserted by the email system.