Collaborative editing
Faithful readers of this blog, all two of them, will remember that one of the main reasons why I haven’t rearranged my entire workflow around LaTeX implementations or even Mellel is the fact that I often need to draft text with others, comment on other people’s work, or use Word’s track changes feature. In other words, I’m not an island unto myself. I collaborate with others.
This issue came up last week in a little project I’m involved in, where a group of four people need to draft one document. One of the participants suggested doing it the traditional way, by sending around Word documents as e-mail attachments. The other three agreed that that’s not the way to go, and we’re now setting up a Wiki for that purpose.
However, in recent months a whole bunch of collaborative environments have sprung up all over the place. There’s at least four that I’m aware of:
All of these, with the possible exception of gOFFICE whose webpage is so badly done that it’s impossible to get any meaningful information without signing up, allow several people to work on the same document; the doc is stored on their servers. No more track changes that someone forgot to turn on, no more person A editing draft X while person B works on draft Y. Neat and simple — except for the fact that you have to relinquish a level of control since your doc is on someone else’s server, and it might potentially be slow over a dialup connection. In fact, what happens when I’m in the middle of an editing session and the damn phone line dies? (I’m not saying that people designing such services should design them around people who have to rely on legacy technology. But it is a fact that especially in eastern and southeastern Europe most folks still dial up.)Of these, unsurprisingly given their other products, Writeboard looks like the most thought-through and well-implemented. A very promising Open Source app that, howeverm, doesn’t seem to be ready for prime time yet is SynchroEdit.
All in all, without having truly tested any of the above services, this is an extremely welcome development.
Update: There’s an article on ZDNet about why web apps may replace desktop apps in the long run, with lots of links. Check it out.
Update 2: Check out this post and discussion over at the Read/Write Web.
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