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AbiCollab Takes On Google Docs and Zoho Writer
msevior writes "Just released today, the free software AbiWord word processor, employed by the One Laptop Per Child project, tightly integrates with a new collaboration Web site to enable easy real-time collaborative editing of documents. AbiCollab.net also enables documents to be stored online, allows format conversion on the fly, stores the history of the docs in svn, provides direct links to HTML-ized docs that update as you save them, and allows easy sharing of docs amongst friends and groups. All in all, new competition for Google Docs and Zoho Writer, but featuring a real word processor rather than an app in a browser."
"...but featuring a real word processor rather than an app in a browser"
Seriously, what on earth is that supposed to mean ?
The submitter, msevior, is one of the Abiword devs, long-term.
I used Abiword several years back. I think I used every linux word processor ever made for a while several years back. Finally settled with Open's. Think it was because of compatibility issues with the rest of the world (the Real one, the one I live in) who used MS, I honestly can't recall. Has Abiword gotten better in that regard? I do know that I'm a bit too far down the road with Open, which has garnered a satisfying momentum and robustness in its own right, to switch now. Unless Abiword is a helluva lot less expensive than Open. Oh yeah, they're both free. Never mind.
Seriously, "collaborative whiteboards" and multi-user editing environments have been around since early Netscape Communicator days - but does anyone actually use or want them? Sure, a system for checking out documents so several people can make changes, but simultaneous editing of documents - what's the use case for them? Who's asking for this? Who's even using it?
This app only works as long as the abicollab.net website is functional, and they will get to see a copy of anything you do. This would only be a useful alternative
if there was a separate deployable web-service that could be INTERNALLY hosted.
The main reason for us not using google apps is that the documents would be vulnerable to privacy issues. This solution does not fix that problem.
If you have access to external web site, you might as well use a web based app.
Works great during a teleconference when you're actually trying to get something done together (and not just useless reports).
Have you ever tried to write a document like an article with many co-authors, an interdisciplinary project report or proposal? Being able to simultaneously change the document saves a LOT of time. Over here, we go with LaTeX and SVN.
WTF, I tried creating a document"BAM" I get blank. I tried again BAM blank. Frantically hit backspace to go to slashdot. Woohoo Both the documents there. I tried to view the document. WTF is a collabnet document. Nice try but a lame attempt.
If you have ever worked on a large project with multiple inputs, you'd know about the current problems and how much of a godsend collab environments are.
Prototyping with such interfaces is incredibly useful. (if the interface itself is good)
Designers, article writers, magazines, project management, programming, etc.
Also, please remember that collaborative editing doesn't mean people making penis drawings over your most recent edit...
We are.
We've been having to use Gobby for collaborative writing because it's the only secure way for us to do writing sessions online. Sure, having some text formatting in a program like that would be nice, but we've been copying the Gobby sessions over to our Wiki and the formatting is done there anyway, so there isn't much of a need for that but it still would be nice for future projects.
Even down the road when we can afford to relocate and work in the same building instead of having all our studio members living in different states, we are still going to do our writing sessions with some kind of real-time collaborative writing software. You have no idea how much easier it is to make changes yourself instead of pointing at someone's screen telling them what to type, or how much faster you can both write when you can both be working on different parts of the script at the same time, or having someone edit your mistakes immediately. When you are actually discussing the story constantly with a co-writer, you really want software like this.
As for whiteboards, we'd really like to have the same real-time collaborative editing that we enjoy with Gobby for our design and art production as well. We've tried things like OpenCanvas or those online paint chat applications, and nothing really cuts it. So for that we are settling with VNC and uploading the files to each other when we need to do some serious red-lining.
What? There is a new equation editor in Google Docs? Cool. Gotta check it out!
(Apologies for ignoring your plug for Zoho. Maybe you shouldn't have mentioned the shiny equation editor.)
Google, presumably, coz now the only feature their stripped down excuse for a word processor had over anything else has been added to a real wordprocessor.
Also, every company dumb enough to think storing internal docs on an out-of-house remote server is a good idea.
What is needed is a plugin for Abiword that can be used to save to *any* svn server, not just the hosted service. That way a company can ensure that their internal documents remain internal. It also means that you can *choose* to be at the whim of a service provider, or *choose* to go it alone.
Such a feature in a word processor would be a *huge* selling point to companies and savvy individuals alike, a selling point that can be used as a real benefit to offset to the very real costs of migrating away from MS Office.
I hate printers.
I want to love Abi, and I have worked with it for short periods several times over the last ten years, but I never stay. Sorry about that. I just always end up needing something that Abi doesn't have.
I appreciate all the work you and the rest of the team has done, and I feel truly sad that OO.o took all the headlines from Abiword (and Gnumeric, and KOffice). I think we (the FOSS community) would be further along right now if OO.o hadn't been released.
I know that you're understaffed and don't get the media coverage you deserve. I'd love to help, but I haven't coded anything since the mid 80s.
Put identity in the browser.
Actually, collaborative, multi-user editing environments have been around a bit longer than "Netscape Communicator days". It was the purpose of that Berners-Lee fellpw's application, 'The World Wide Web'.
i've found GDocs useful for sharing, but not a viable competitor to MSO or ever OO.o (in terms of features). Based on your post, i've created a Zoho account and will give it a try. i use GDocs mostly for its integration into all my other Google stuff. It's convenient to be in my GMail account and then hit Documents, and there i am. Getting my friends to go to yet another site to share stuff might annoy me and my friends, as made up as they are.
What i'd really love is for docs and email to be seamless *cough* GWave *cough*. But i don't have an invite yet.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
I tried to move from G.A. to Zoho, but Zoho ate my work three times in two days.I showed up at my presentations only to find the files were corrupted on Zoho's servers. That takes away the only reason to use a web-based office app.
Put identity in the browser.
As opposed to something more useful, like WebEx or Live Meeting?
Well, yes. I first came across them in the early 90s whilst a student presented with unfettered access to the WWW whilst at the University of Leeds - where I attended a talk about what the web was going to do for us all, hosted by Tim Berners-Lee. A very nice guy from what I remember. I picked Communicator as an example of when it was hitting what passed for the mainstream...
Right, emailing documents and files across is enough for everyone. Oh, nevermind that is limited to 10/20 MB. Oh, you end up a mess of versions. Not everyone can setup and use a VCS, particularly not end-users.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
What would be even better, is that we offer a self-hosted version. In an ideal world, I'd open source all of abicollab.net right now, but we need to have an business plan discussion first before we decide to do that :)
Haha, blame the design people. Apparently they really care about how a tittle piece of text looks :) I'll kill the flash off as soon as possible, but we were on a deadline.
OMG I GOT MY WAVE ACCOUNT YESTERDAY!!!!! and yes with a little spit shine and polish wave will eventually be what groove should of been. these guys are just catching up with Google Docs? welcome to 2007?
When we were trying to plan our wedding from two different countries, collaborative documents were extremely useful. We could both add things, review what the other was doing, and keep everything in a single place. It kept everything simple and easy.
While not everyone needs collaborative editing, it is extremely useful in some situations.
If there were a remotely current version of AbiWord for OS X. Sadly that part of their development dropped by the wayside quite some time ago.
AbiWord is currently at 2.8 for Windows and Linux, but 2.4.x for OS X. That is two major versions behind, and call be crazy but I kinda want some of the things that have been added.
I used to use AbiWord a lot. It was small and fast and mimiced the way Office did it's tool pallets on the Mac. So AbiWord would be where documents tented to start with me, when formatting needed to be more elaborate, then I would move to Office.
Now I just use Office all the time. OpenOffice is finally an acceptable OS X citizen, but it isn't great. For me at least, the price of it is the only compelling reason to like OpenOffice, but that is about all. In terms of features and feel, I am sorry but all I can say is not yet...
What do you know I wrote a novel
I think you are confusing "savvy" with "rather technical," because I can think of better things to use for a document repository than SVN. Especially if I want other people I collaborate with to want to use it as well.
What do you know I wrote a novel
All the technicalities are ofcourse hidden for the normal user. You just click "open" on the webpage, edit the document, and press save.
My business plan is to not think about abicollab again until I hear that the server component is FLOSS. :-)
We are working on making a downloadable "server component" available. Until we do, you'll indeed have to trust us to keep our servers online.
I do it on google docs all time time. Phone + real time changes:
-- OK I basically agree with your tables except I'd change A to B
or with code review:
-- I highlighted the lines I had questions about, and then comments get added live
Can you simultaneously edit real documents (any document abiword can open, so that's a huge amount and variety), fully featured (every feature AbiWord supports) at the same time - with parties not necessarily looking at the same part of the document (aka, not simple screen-sharing), and so on with those apps? You can with AbiWord. Use it with your voice or voice/video teleconference, sure, but putting a real word-processor in everyone's hands is powerful.
I recognize people by their sigs. Is that a bad thing?
Actually, if you look at the source of the page, you can see that the designers apparently used a flash text image replacement technique for all the "spiffy" ui elements. This is a common technique among some of the most standards-aware web designers today, certainly not an anomaly. The code itself is clean, and if you look at the page without flash, you don't get flash buttons. Just checked it, and the page still looks and works fine with no-script blocking javascript and flash.
I recognize people by their sigs. Is that a bad thing?
Does this mean that Abiword may finally fix the bugs that make it a bloody pain to use? I swear, every time I've tried it, it was like pulling teeth.
The whole point of using a web based document editor is convenience. Google Docs is the most convenient, and for when I want features, I use Pages on my mac or Word 2007 on my desktop or openoffice.org if I'm in the mood. The point is, Zoho won't ever get anywhere near the features of full on desktop apps, and won't be as convenient as Google.
I'm just waiting for EyeOS 2.0 (http://eyeos.org/) to come out. Look at the preview of EyeDocs (http://blog.eyeos.org/2009/10/09/introducing-eyedocs-2/) ... and with the right configuration it can save OpenDocument files.
Best of all...it's self hosted!
Make America grate again!
I hear you.
I'm currently working with a company that uses Google Docs for everything, and I've come to the conclusion that Google Docs itself is one of the major reasons that they've completely failed to ship a product despite 4 years of continuous effort (I know this sounds a bizarre thing to say, but it's true). Google docs is wonderful and seductive for collaboration, but it is worse than useless for writing any kind of serious documentation. It lacks so many serious features it destroys the integrity of every document put into it and turns them into one-off memos with a hundred "spam" comments from stakeholders riddled through them and / or surreptitiously changed. Nobody draws diagrams because docs won't support them, no tables of contents, bibiliographies, footnotes, proper cross references, heading numbers, no proper "track changes" ... There are features to mitigate some of these things, but in the end, it's not enough - Google Docs is a disaster for serious documents that need to be part of controlled processes.