nizo's Journal: Collaborative document editing, anyone seen this beast?

I am looking for some kind of web-based document collaboration. It would be nice if someone could upload a doc (with their browser) and then I could edit it, and they could later come back and see my edits in their browser and then make changes/resubmit/etc. All this could happen in text files just fine (though my annotations/changes would have to be stored somehow, not sure how). Has anyone heard of anything like this?

Yeah, its called ECM

[FortKnox]

It does everything you want plus much much more. Mostly used by banking and government and other document based businesses. Unfortunately, its expensive (as in, over $1,000,000.00) and most require multiple servers to run. Its meant for large enterprises and such, so good luck finding something small for little projects...

Re:Yeah, its called ECM

[nizo]

Yeah that is a little out of my price range, since I was looking for, umm, something free :-) I am looking at stuff that lets you annotate web pages, but haven't found anything like that either. I am thinking about writing some code to do this, but would rather find something if I can. What I want is pretty simple, at least it SEEMS like it would be, so I am suprised that I haven't found squat so far.

Re:Yeah, its called ECM

[FortKnox]

What about a wiki? It does document management and everything... would something liek that work??

Re:Yeah, its called ECM

[nizo]

Yeah I thought about that (I am familiar with TWiki) but I was hoping for something that any old yahoo could use. Then again, if I am the only one who is an "editor" of papers, perhaps a wiki is the way to go. I know you can edit and leave comments in different colors with TWiki, have you done anything like this with any other wiki, or have another wiki you prefer?

Re:Yeah, its called ECM

[FortKnox]

Sorry... I'm familiar with wikis, but never used one.

Re:Yeah, its called ECM

[peacefinder]

Check out the journal of Degrees [slashdot.org] for some recent commentary on various wiki implementations.

Re:Yeah, its called ECM

[js7a]

I agree that you probably want a wiki. They're easy. Learning curve investment of no more than a half hour for anyone who already can use a word processor and a web browser.

Wiki or... Document Management?

[Allen Zadr]

I'm fond of "MoinMoin" (very popular) and "MediaWiki" (the base software of WikiPedia).

You may also want to look at products that are simpler, like CMS or Content Management Solutions (basically work like CVS for arbitrary data files), where you "check out" (which also starts a download), and "check in" (which asks for the upload) - it keeps diffs, and allows for commentary to go along with each revision (usually easy enough for most folks to use). Not sure who does a good job at this for 'free', my compa

Text documents are teh suck

[M.C. Hampster]

Microsoft Office 2003 has the world's greatest collaboration features ever. Of course, this doesn't work well with text documents.

Re:Text documents are teh suck

[smittyoneeach]

Yeah, but in Word you better not use Shift+F3 to cycle case with Track Changes on, if you want those edits saved. A fun bug going back several versions. When I reported this to Mr. Softy, the word came back that, it could arguably be a bug, but, since no one had noticed for all these years, it could be considered the design behavior.
Which logic I found brilliant!

Re:Text documents are teh suck

[M.C. Hampster]

Ah yes, the old "behavior by design" bit. I just LOVE that.

mickeysoft sharepoint?

[Triumph The Insult C]

someone pointed it out to me today. they were trying to tell me it was a replacment for cvs heh

Off the top of my head

[igrp]

There's always Acrobat Professional which does allow web-based and email-based reviews. (Pros: works well, easy to use, for some reason pretty popular in academia so it's less of a PITA to setup if you need to cater to that particular crowd; Cons: it's big, it's overkill and it's expensive).

OOo does have version management. And, at least in recent versions, it works very well. (Pros: It's OOo, it's free; Cons: You need to convince people to use OOo, you need to build the webbased frontend yourself).

Then t

Re:Off the top of my head

[nizo]

Hey thanks for the ideas, you got me to thinking and I went and checked abiword, and sure enough it has simple revision capabilities. I like abiword because it is fairly lightweight and has both linux and windows versions. I like OO too, but it is a pretty big install (I haven't even had a chance to look at the 2.0 beta yet). More food for thought anyway...