Collaborative Document sharing
2web3
feel this discomfort with current state of document creation. Let me
explain.
In the beginning there were just simple text editors. Then they got
more sophisticated, visual, WYSIWYG, culminating with products such as
MS Word and alike. This is all great, but the document is stored in
individual files (silos) and is hard to share and collaborate with a
team. Of course, you can send via e-mail, but then the proliferation
of versions and comments makes this kind of collaboration difficult.
Then came centralized systems such as SharePoint that allow to store
the documents in one place, lock the document so that only one person
can edit it. However this again is far from perfect: I cannot easily
track the history, who did what, what has really changed. And I still
cannot properly comment on the document. But is better than e-mail.
Then wikis came along. They made a whole bunch of stuff easy
(versioning with diff, easy access to information, search, permissions
etc). But they lack several important features a modern editor has:
* They are not truly WYSIWYG. Any wiki is light-years behind Word
from editing capabilities. This is a major impediment why wikis are
not widely used in our organization.
* They are not easy to work with in offline mode (when traveling on
a plane)
* They generally rapidly degrade in performance as more users use a
wiki installation
* It is not easy to just send a wiki "document" to somebody,
especially to an external partner, when the wiki is on intranet. It
has to be opened to external users, security policies need to be put
in place etc. E-Mail is just light years easier in this respect.
* Wikis, being web application, poorly support rich formatting that
we've come to expect from a Word doc. I cannot easily take a wiki
"document", print to PDF and send it to external partner - usually the
document will not look professional. And to make it look professional
in wiki will take way more time and resources than just to write it
from scratch in Word.
So here's my dilemma... Can anybody help me point out to a solution?
Or if you experience the same issue - share your feelings as well, let
me know that I'm not suffering alone.
Kenneth Marcy
> I have a somewhat generic question related to editors in general. I
> feel this discomfort with current state of document creation. Let me
> explain.
<snip>
> So here's my dilemma... Can anybody help me point out to a solution?
> Or if you experience the same issue - share your feelings as well, let
> me know that I'm not suffering alone.
2web3
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_real-time_editor
I'm not interested in real-time collaboration. There are indeed plenty
of solutions for that, but it is useful only in limited situations.
What I asked is there a wiki-style system, where I can store LOTS of
discoverable content and collaborate on it with my co-workers, and
which is actually USABLE, gives me a rich interface, not some cryptic
wiki language, or some crippled down editor. And which I can use
offline as well.
Am I alone in my quest and everybody else is happy with what's there
already? Common people, speak up!
SM
> I'm not interested in real-time collaboration. There are indeed plenty
> of solutions for that, but it is useful only in limited situations.
> What I asked is there a wiki-style system, where I can store LOTS of
> discoverable content and collaborate on it with my co-workers, and
> which is actually USABLE, gives me a rich interface, not some cryptic
> wiki language, or some crippled down editor. And which I can use
> offline as well.
>
> Am I alone in my quest and everybody else is happy with what's there
> already? Common people, speak up!
I would use some VCS for this kind of collaboration. No matter what
technique (wiki, text editor, word processor etc) is used. Git,
Subversion et al.
--
kasmra
:wq
andrea
Now I use emacs + http://orgmode.org/ for almost everything.
The only way to happiness is keep it simple, text file is the only way.
I have to say it's not easy to learn, but this + git and you will be
happy for life...
Gary Johnson
If you want to generate discoverable content and work collaboratively in
the sense you've described, you can't beat plain text, a good text
editor and a good CVS, as others have suggested. If additionally you
want to generate professional-looking documents (e.g., nicely typeset
documents in PDF), I'd suggest LaTeX. For a WYSIWY[almost]G editor,
there is Lyx, although I don't use it myself.
I know this falls short of your expectations for a simple user
interface, but there is nothing I know of that supports all of your
requirements completely, so you'll have to figure out what compromise
satisfies you best.
--
Gary Johnson
Malcolm Dew-Jones
: 2009-11-21, 2web3 skribis:
I'm no big fan of mw word, but it does work.
MS Word can keep comments, change notes, change bars etc inside documents.
Combine that with CVS (VCS?) or another source control system and you have
much of what you want. A microsoft tool such as source safe or team
foundation probably has ways to compare different versions of word docs,
but failing that, what I use is antiword and diff (wrapped in a bat file)
to compare word docs (however not with msword 2007 .docx files, though
they could probably be compared with an xml compare tool).
I don't know how you would merge different versions of word docs, perhaps
it has a tool to do that, or you could probably write a basic macro to
assist if you wished, but when all else fails simply lock the checked out
document so the editors are forced to work on it one person at a time.
The source control can track the high level changes and who did what.
The source control also acts as a central point of backup.
$0.10
DMcCunney
wrote:
> MS Word can keep comments, change notes, change bars etc inside documents.
> Combine that with CVS (VCS?) or another source control system and you have
> much of what you want. A microsoft tool such as source safe or team
> foundation probably has ways to compare different versions of word docs,
> but failing that, what I use is antiword and diff (wrapped in a bat file)
> to compare word docs (however not with msword 2007 .docx files, though
> they could probably be compared with an xml compare tool).
>
> I don't know how you would merge different versions of word docs, perhaps
> it has a tool to do that, or you could probably write a basic macro to
> assist if you wished, but when all else fails simply lock the checked out
> document so the editors are forced to work on it one person at a time.
Component Software has a custom version of RCS intended to handle
things like Word docs. It's free for single-user usage and open
source development. See http://www.componentsoftware.com/Products/DocMan/index.htm
______
Dennis