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Open Source Collaborative and Presentation Tools?
An anonymous reader asks: "I've been asked to discuss collaboration tools at un upcoming meeting. Things like Groove, DocuShare, and WebEx all have significant costs associated with them, so I'm curious to know what everyone on Slashdot is using (if anything). What kind of software would you use to enable simultaneous document editing with version control, or to sync presentations across participant browsers for an online meeting, etc?"
SubEthaEdit is pretty sweet. Free for personal use, 35$ for commercial use isn't too bad...
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Try NetMeeting + a Wiki
Anybody who uses CVS isn't a likely candidate to use sophisticated collaboration tools.
I've just been employed by a group of academics to come up with something like this over the next 6 months or so. My requirements were open source, perl and apache based with the flexibility to server copyright and draft material to group members, and public domain/less sensitive stuff to anyone. I'm now using Maypole and judicious use of the Template Toolkit, I'm hoping to open source it at the end, and get some employment in my field of choice using it as leverage too.
"...we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that." B.Spears 2003
I can recommend Edgewall's trac for a svn server/wiki/project manager. It is F/OSS and very flexible in my experience. I am using it for a development community similar to the idea of sourceforge but much smaller and dedicated to extensions/distros/etc of a single OSS project. I am also using it for my own projects and I can highly recommend it.
""I've been asked to discuss collaboration tools at un upcoming meeting. Things like Groove, DocuShare, and WebEx all have significant costs associated with them, so I'm curious to know what everyone on Slashdot is using (if anything). "
What costs beyond monetary, and what does F/OSS do to correct them?
I haven't used it for a few years, but you might want to take a look at GroupKit (http://www.groupkit.org/ and on Sourceforge). It has things like shared workspaces, whiteboards and chat capabilites.
Also, a Google search for "CSCW" (Computer Supported Collaborative Working -- the term used in academic circles for this kind of thing) may throw up some useful stuff.
There's a list of collaborative real-time document editors at WikiPedia:Collaborative_real-time_editor One of them is Gobby, which is multi-platform and free software. But you want version control, too; so I guess that would be a wiki which support real-time simultaineous editing. Some of the wikis have been talking about this (example), but I don't know if it's been implemented yet. I believe one project along those lines is the Yarrr extension to MediaWiki.
Check out Tight VNC and a good audio connection.
I've recently started a new site designed for professional Open Source collaboration. Treffpunkt (http://www.treffpunktsystems.com/) has a suite of tools that is designed for professional development teams to manage their projects, track time and tickets, and even use a wiki and file storage for sharing notes and files, such as specs and documentation. Though it may not be exactly what you're looking for, it is Open Source Software and mean for Open Source developers.
t -open-source-project.html)
It's meant to be an easy to use single point of contact for all of any given developer's projects, regardless of who the client may be. Peter George over at Logicalware (http://www.logicalware.com/ and http://logicalware.blogspot.com/2005/07/treffpunk
seems to agree with its ease of use philosophy, "Treffpunkt convinces me of its usability within five minutes, and I'm sold."
** Martin
Netmeeting can be used to share a single browser window pointed at a Wiki.
And if one doesn't like Netmeeting, one can user an OSS application that supports H.323 such as GNOMEMeeting
"What kind of software would you use to enable simultaneous document editing with version control, or to sync presentations across participant browsers for an online meeting?"
MediaWiki
It's been used to edit a 600,000-page document over at Wikipedia, where it seems to cope okay with about 6000 simultaneous editors. It has version control, file uploads, image support, etc. which means that you should be able to create most types of document with it.
I know this is probably going to be shot down - and its not open source - but Windows Sharepoint Services from MS is quite cool and free. I suggest you check it out - its quite customisable and very easy to use.
Not open-source, but Microsoft has some built-in features, and there is some other software available. I blogged about a couple times: collaborative editing and NetMeeting + Word collaborative editing.
You don't say whether you're talking about text or not. If you are talking about binary data, like images, then its very hard to support that sort of feature. About the best you'll do is a SQL database with metadata about the changes. CVS or RCS is just pitiful with collaborative effort with binary data.
And having a lesbian sit on your face and spew in your mouth is pleasing to purple fuzzy dice.
Coccinella
This is a Jabber client with integrated whiteboard, all built in TCL/Tk so it builds and runs on Windows, Linux and OS X.
Just to throw in my thoughts on Groove, as a comparison:
We use Groove for coordinating a small development team in the US, UK and Germany. We bought Groove because we wanted a common communication, calendar and file store. It's generally quite nice, but:
The bad:
- It's very slow. The task management (Gantt chart) tool becomes unusably slow with any reasonably sized project.
- The chat tool is crap. We went back to xchat after a few days trying to use it.
- The UI is annoying, with lots of unneccessary flashing and changes
The good:
- Most of the tools are pretty good: meetings, web link repository etc all work nicely
- File syncing seems to work pretty well
It's a very nice idea and it works pretty well, it's just not quite well polished enough yet. An OSS alternative virtual office would be very welcome: I would imagine a lot of it could be built using already complete projects: webdav, rsync etc.
We ue TWiki, http://twiki.org/ as a center of a international scientific collaboration. We have currently about 70 users, not all equally active.
It has fairly extensive plugin structure, a very nice pdf export functions and extensive access controls. Sometime IM chats logs are just copy-pasted straight in. If you use your wiki words consistently, it all tightly integrates conceptually. The RSS feeds are also very useful. Kind of a delayed chat...
This is especially great since we have people on four continents collaborating, and timezones are widely spread.
We use it mainly to build knowledge and internally peer-review it and co-author scientific papers. You can even use it as a presentation tool, with a browser on full screen.
Dont know if this is what you need but it works like a charm for us. And it is all GPL, and written in perl.
Complexity is a measure of our ignorance...
SubEtha's collaborative editing is cool, but I like other editors. Fortunately, you can also have collaborative editing in many other text editors.
DocSynch is a plugin for jEdit which used IRC for collaborative editing.
SangamPlugin adds collaborative editing to Eclipse.
Old school? Use VimSynch or Emacs or any text-mode editor with screen.
Try MERMIG.COM for a true J2EE-based Open source collaborative solution with all the bells and whistles you can handle!
I ran across Silk the other day and it seems promising. Silk is a GPLed general purpose web-based collaborative framework based on J2EE. I am not sure if it does everything you need but it is currently under active development. The project home page is located at http://www.silk-project.org/index.html and there an online demo available.
A man who wants nothing is invincible