Web research: a collaborative dilemma

The past few weeks we have been working on a particular project which has required myself and a few other team members from separate offices working on separate servers to conduct research on the web. For the purpose of the job we have also been asked to save the the links to relevant pages that we find and place those links in a categorized document. Well, we began to talk about how we were going to update this document with each team member working from different offices and off of different servers. Some of the questions being asked by team members were: How would we divide up the work? How would we keep from duplicating looking for information that had already been linked in. How could we keep up with the progress of the different team members with out asking for regular e-mail updates. We threw around the idea of having IT set up a few extra work stations at the central office so team members could come over in the afternoons to work on the project. We actually tried this for a few days, but it just proved to be to difficult. The schedules and workloads of team members did not make it easy to just pick up in the afternoons and leave your work environment for a different office where you could not monitor e-mail or be available for the countless last minute tasks that arise in the profession. We then looked at having the project manager e-mail out the research document and each person would work on their designated part of the document from their office and e-mail their updates to the project manager at the end of the day. At the onset of this strategy, it looked like e-mailing updated documents to the project manager would work okay, but as it turned out the nature of the research made this method terribly inefficient and although we were assigned different sections of the document to work on we were still duplicating each others work left and right.... To find out why we were duplicating each others work what we decided to do, tune in to the next post.