Slashdot Mirror
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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I totally agree. Easy to setup - dead simple to use. Has features than "Enterprise" wiki's (such as confluence) don't have.
The timeline feature alone is worthwhile - throw in the Roadmap. All it needs is a better ticket workflow (selectable per ticket) and it easier support for multiple projects and it would be perfect.
groklaw, wired and slashdot. The holy trinity of work based time wasting.
"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.
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.
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.
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.