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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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not free, needs windows
not real time collaborative, netmeeting can have only one cursor in a file
not real time collaborative, wiki wont let you see real time as someone else is typing
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.
"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.