When comments are added to the online document, iWork, in my experience, doesn’t auto-notify the “contributors” nor “commenters”. This requires the user to manually notify the other commenters with additional comments. Even worse, there’s nothing in the online app that allows a simple “Notify Of Your Comments”, so to speak, option. So you’re relegated to manually opening your email or the original iWork document to send a new update.

Unless, I’m missing something.

Plus, I found myself going through my history and not sure how it happened, but I launched a URL and started adding comments. Though this time my comments were attributed to one of the other collaborators who I sent the document for review. That means that with that URL a commenter can comment under someone else’s name. There needs to be some level or security or simply verification that the commenter is indeed authorized and so that comments can be attributed correctly.

If all I want it to show some friends a Presentation Slide & get the comments, then I can upload a document to my Office Live Workspace & share the document or the workspace. It even supports versions

Collaboration is also a big mess. How can you work on a document if everyone is editing it! We could never get any work done that way. Besides, every writeup has a particular tone to it, which speaks a lot about its author. If you mix it up, the whole things falls apart. iWork.com’s comments-only is the best feature they could have enabled. That way everyone can see and say what they want, but the document itself remains intact. I also like that you can download it in three different versions. Makes it so much simpler.

iWork.com is gonna rock, and I’m definitely going to be a subscriber. I just hope it get better integration with Mail, MobileMe, and the iPhone.