Collaborative scientific writing and sharing using freely available tools

Collaborative writing of scientific articles requires considerable amount of coordination and a strong synchronization among authors. Online tools such as Wikis and Google Docs have facilitated the real time editing and reviewing of a text document by multiple individuals. These real-time collaborative tools allow multiple users to edit the same file at the same time. Despite being powerful collaboration tools, Wikis and Google Docs are not suitable for scientific writing because they lack cite while you write feature which is essential for the citation and reference management during the scientific writing. Lack of interaction between these tools and reference management software make them more difficult to use. A detailed comparison of different reference management software is available here. In my opinion a workflow for real time collaborative scientific writing and sharing requires some basic features such as sharing of citations, synchronization of online shared documents (via Google Docs or my favorite tool Zoho Docs) and references (CiteULike or Connotea) with desktop based word processing tools such as Microsoft Office or Open Office. Like every other researcher I have my own workflow for collaborative writing and sharing which is synchronized using a group of tools most of them are freely available. Each of the tools in my workflow have their own pros and cons and I don’t want to cover all those details here(you can refer following articles written by Martin Fenner, Bibliographic Management meets Web 2.0 and Reference Manager Overview), but together they create a powerful setup.
My Basic Workflow

In my setup web based document sharing is enabled using Zoho docs which is quite similar to Google Docs, and it includes everything from word processing, spreadsheets to presentations. Zoho Docs offers several tools and features including a Microsoft Office plug-in which allows the real-time synchronization of online files with desktop Microsoft Office application and 1 GB free space for individual uses. Online sharing of scientific reference is done using CiteULike which can be synchronized one way to Mendeley Desktop which offers word plug-in for citation management or in-text citing. Otherwise CiteULike library can be imported as RIS format into either Zotero or commercial software EndNote, both Zotero and EndNote offer plug-in for word. In personal experience EndNote word plug-in is better than Zotero and Mendeley, particularly Mendeley which is quite unstable and frequent crash is very common. A student copy of EndNote cost around 5 NZ$ for one year but it makes your life lot more easier, alternatively Zotero is better option if you don’t want to pay for EndNote. Recently launched Zotero 2.0 Beta provides automatic synchronization of collections (both data and files) among multiple computers or browsers making it more powerful than ever, although sharing is not fully functional yet. Data synchronization uses the Zotero server while file synchronization is carried out using your own WebDAV service. But why so many pathways- well it is always advised to use multiple online services to backup your data, otherwise there is no guarantee that a given service will be live for all the time.
I know many of you have your own way of doing the things, I would like hear from you about how exactly you do collaborative scientific writing?