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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Re: Collaborative editing / Versionning for koffice
From:       Boudewijn Rempt <boud () valdyas ! org>
Date:       2006-05-30 6:20:11
Message-ID: 200605300820.11455.boud () valdyas ! org
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On Tuesday 30 May 2006 01:43, Robert Knight wrote:

> Whatever we do, I think we should aim to keep it fairly simple, and
> make sure that it gets used.

Let's see... From my personal experience, there are two levels of 
collaborative editing that are interesting:

* change management _in_ the document, where it's possible to discover who did 
what. For instance, I once wrote an article for oreilly.net together with a 
co-author. We used OO (version 1) and the editor used Word. Changes were 
visible in the document and could be attributed to the responsible party. 
This is very useful in many circumstances. It's also part of Fredrik's SoC 
project for KWord. We just need to make sure that Fredrik's design is 
applicable to the other KOffice apps.

* real-time collaborative editing. When Sander and me are working on Krita's 
manual, it would be very useful if he in Delft and me in Deventer could see 
the document, in a split window, me seeing him edit and he seeing me edit. We 
would need a (preferably voice-based) chat channel next to it to coordinate. 
Another example is something that happened yesterday: Cyrille and me were 
hunting bugs in the duplicate tool. We should have used mateedit to see what 
we were doing, instead of throwing line numbers and changes over irc.

I have never needed collaborative editing outside wordprocessing or coding, 
although I can imagine it would be useful for creating presentations, too, 
and for diagramming.

> It is worth noting that since only a small number of people use KWord,
> it would be very helpful if any collaborative features didn't require
> all parties to be using KOffice - that is the typical problem I would
> expect to run into using a Microsoft application.    If any part of
> your workflow relies on a non-Microsoft app then it all falls apart.

I think we shouldn't care about that. It's entirely unrealistic to expect it 
to be possible to build a real-time collaboration feature that supports MS 
applications. We'd need to find how & why sharepoint works, get it up & 
running and then dodge all legal obstacles. I'm all for going it alone here: 
let's first get it working, and then use the experience to build a protocol.

Oh, and since Abiword already has collaborative editing, we should look at 
their implementation & protocol before designing our own.

-- 
Boudewijn Rempt 
http://www.valdyas.org/fading/index.cgi

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