Google Docs

Google Docs is the document editor in Google Workspace, built around real time collaboration with granular permissions controlling who can edit, comment, download, share or view. It adds eSignature for drafting agreements and managing contract templates, building blocks for meeting notes drawn from Calendar events and for reusable text, version history, and import and editing of Word documents and PDFs.

Permission granularity is the feature that makes the collaboration usable in an organisation rather than merely possible. Sharing a document is easy anywhere; controlling that a reviewer can comment but not download, or view but not share onward, is what allows a contract or a salary review to live in the same system as everything else.

eSignature inside the editor is a more significant addition than it appears. Agreements are drafted in a document and then signed somewhere else, and that handoff is where version confusion begins, because the signed artefact stops being the document people keep editing.

Editing Word files and PDFs directly matters because most organisations do not get to choose what they receive. A tool that requires conversion before collaboration puts the friction exactly where the work arrives, which is the point at which people give up and reply with an attachment instead.