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?"

Comments

well

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure what you mean by "simultaneous document editing with version control", that just sounds like a bunch of buzzwords. However, to sync a presentation accross multiple browsers wouldn't be hard.

Just make a website that has regular pages, and an admin page. The admin page requires a login, which enables a bar at the top which when clicked will progress to the next page, and sets a value in a database for the regular pages to find.

The regular pages have no way to reach the next page, except for a javascript HttpXMLRequest that is run every 5 seconds. The request is to a page which returns the value in the database set by the admin page. If the admin page has not gone to the next page yet, the request returns false, else it returns true and the javascript redirects to the next page automatically.

Fun stuff.