Outliners for collaborative writing

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 1662

Posted by carlos
2003-08-01 14:36:50

Please forgive me for changing the subject of the thread (Stay away from MyBase), but I believe the conversation has deviated enough from its initial purpose to grant the change.

I have visited the WEB sites that were recommended in a previous message (thanks), and I will check the applications recommended by Derek in Message 1661.

I started the search motivated by a single purpose: the creation and collaborative edition of a book.

The ideal requirements included pieces of all the applications listed so far:

- Easy to use two- or three-pane outlining, with separation of structure (outline pane) from content (item pane) and anciliary information (mostly attachments and links)—MyBase looked good, albeit clunky in the outline manipulation pane (why not use the familiar Word Outline keys, for example?), and lacking writing tools (spell checker, thesaurus, etc.)

- Ability to use in-line graphics. Nothing fancy, no run-around needed, just insertion from simple graphic formats (ahhhh, More 3.1, how much do we miss you…)

- Ability to export to HTML—Mybase good as well

- Easy integration with knowledge bases (I own and use AskSam and dtSearch)—SurfSaver?, so that content can be discovered and pulled into the WEB site during the edition process

- Browser-based edition of the content AND the structure with a controlled-user interface (Manila, Twiki, some of many other open-source CMS’s). I assumed all along that this would be a separate system, but was hoping that some XML-based integration back and forth would be possible.

- Recollection from edited content in the WEB to the writing environment again (MyBase’s WEB Collect)

After looking and trying for a while, I can only say that I wish I hadn’t crashed with MyBase: the functional coverage was basic but minimalistically sufficient, and the promise of HTML export and capture was “just as needed…” As for the rest of the apps, each application looks capable and stable (they certainly haven’t corrupted data files so far), but then again, it’s hard to say how they will behave with large volumes of data (600 pages+), and integrations needed are yet to be explored.

The option of doing all development on the WEB is also interesting, particularly when there are CMS’s that support everything from email-based content contribution to browser-based edition to even CHAT BASED contribution (?!). but ooops… hard to do any significative outlining (outlining is a key piece of my creative and expression process, a hard one to sacrifice).

Thanks to all of you for the pointers, I will keep researching tools, and as soon as I find something will try to report back.

Cheers
Carlos Caballero :::: e la nave va…

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