Free Tools for Collaborative Editing?

zachrahan asks: "I have almost completely removed Microsoft Office from my work-flow. One hurdle remains, though -- sending scientific manuscripts out to colleagues for comments. Everyone I know simply uses MS Word's Track Changes feature for this. To tell the truth, this works quite well. However, I'd prefer to use free software to write my articles, like LaTeX or OpenOffice and then distribute PDFs or host HTML files for people to look over. I've been working a bit with Multivalent, which is very promising, but still firmly in alpha. Are there any other free, cross-platform tools for collaborative marking up of PDF or HTML (or other) documents, a la Word's track changes feature?"

Comments

OOo has that feature.

[Bistronaut]

OpenOffice.org Writer does have a track changes feature like Word's.

Best tool for the job

[duffbeer703]

Is MS Word

Do you want to waste time screwing with diff and cvs and forcing your colleagues to switch to some complex system or do you want to get your work done?

Re:Best tool for the job

[zulux]

Increasingly the cost of Word and the scattered versions is making it less and less of a productive tool.

When 20% your team can't afford to upgrade to Word XP, 30% is still on Word 97, 10% is on Word for Mac, and 5% have their notmal.dot template taken over by a Windows virus - it's easier to tell everybody to workload OpenOffice 1.1 and call it a day.

Re:Best tool for the job

[ClosedSource]

"Has not Microsoft been convicted of criminal behaviour ?"

No, Microsoft hasn't been "convicted" of anything. The antitrust case was a civil one.

You probably...

[Anonymous Coward]

should've considered your needs before even looking to remove MS Office from your workflow.

If I were your boss and I learned that you removed MS Office just because you hate MS, and now are looking to change everyone's life to match your crusade, i'd wish you luck on the unemployment line.

how do you get collaboration with isolation?

[frink_exp]

Is this really what's needed now-a-days: another way to avoid interacting with people and calling it work? The best way to collaborate with others is to sit down with them in person, or at least on the phone or live via tele- or video conference.

When I started working at Boeing in Seattle, the veteran designers told me stories of "back in the day" when you'd toss your part drawings over to the stress engineers and they'd return them marked up. They'd go back and forth like this with very little face-to-face interaction. When I joined, the mentality was very different - you actually talked to engineers whose functions were different from yours - wow! Things got done with far fewer iterations.

This was true in high school too. We had a drop-in writing aide when you needed help with an essay for class, college application, whatever. There was just one "catch": you weren't allowed to drop off a paper and expect to get it back with editor's marks. You were required to sit down with the aide and read it aloud with them, reviewing and improving every line. In class, when we did peer reviews, it was the same thing. The result was better essays and better skills.

If you really want to collaborate with others, then do it - the right way.

Re:how do you get collaboration with isolation?

[cooldev]

Face to face collaboration is sometimes very productive, but not always. Sometimes it's a complete waste of everybody's time, and often it really is less productive than people working together, independently. This is especially true when it comes to things like creating an original document or design.

One problem is that face to face collaboration often doesn't give people the same time to think and reflect on the work as sequential document or email-based collaboration. So you end up with very vocally skilled people completely ruling the collaboration: Carrot Top doing all the talking while Einstein can barely get in a word edgewise.

The key is to recognize when each type of communication is appropriate.

Wrong question...

[biodork]

You really need to ask,
"Are there any free...etc... that I can use and yet still allow everyone else to keep using word?" as you - 1 person, will not be able to make everyone else change. I will give you an almost iron clad guarentee that the first time you give them the 'different' thing, or that requires they learn something new, that they won't do it or they will ask for word. They will wonder, and I think quite rightly, "Why are you fixing something that we don't think is broken".

By this I mean, they haven't made the descision to live in a Microsoft free world, and thus they don't see anything wrong with this nice way of making changes. You can try to convert them to your way of thinking, but you have to factor in that most people want to do things the easiest way they can, and for them (already knowing how the MS way works) the track changes way is best.

From my own use.... I love this feature, and use it all the time.