Most of the topics here focus on _Personal_ outlining and information management, but several of us have mentioned, on various occasions, the need for team collaboration. Indeed, in my own daily operations nowadays, sharing information and working with others on common material represents most of my work time.

Team collaboration means many things, so rather than leave this thread open to everything from wikis to project management solutions, I propose to focus on one particular aspect, which is joint textual development, e.g. for proposals, reports, scientific publications, etc. I would not exclude the quantitative components of such deliverables, though they may well deserve their own thread.

A special aspect of such textual collaboration are knowledge bases, e.g. wikis. I'm personally interested on more structured formats, e.g. like folder trees and mind maps, but others' minds may work otherwise.

(If there is interest on other collaborative applications, e.g. for project management, I would propose to initiate separate threads.)

In the context of textual development, I seem to use many of the wonderful tools discussed here at preliminary stages, or to provide an overview of the expected outcome, whereas I must then turn to 'universal' formats like word processor documents to share my input and work with others on a common deliverable. The inverse also happens, e.g. if I am responsible for the final product, I will probably get everybody's input in .doc(x) format and then combine, restructure and cross-reference it with an outliner or mindmapper (usually also used as an outliner).

With much of the work happening 'in the middle', i.e. after agreeing on the outline and before joining all the texts together, I wonder what solutions people here have come up with for collaborating with others on joint texts?

Jose has mentioned the use of the file system itself, allowing for everyone to work on their own document, with an outliner such as Aignes? AM-notebook to provide the overview, and several other such solutions were proposed in the relevant thread. However, would this mean also sharing the outline (overview) itself? It is mostly such solutions I'm personally interested in, i.e. allowing everyone to see both the forest and the trees.

Re collaborative document editing and sharing:

The key for this type of need is to have something that is
1. readable, and
2. usable by everyone

The best solution I've found is to create a separate Wordpress blog for the project.

Pages offer hierarchical organization, while posts offer ephemeral updates. You can subscribe via RSS, and everyone can edit.

You can control the permissioning and passwords via the plugin "Password Protect Wordpress Blog" (for simple authorization needs)

A good theme for this type of blog is "Toolbox 1.3"

I also find the plugin "post type switcher" handy for when a post needs to be converted to a canonical document.

Hi, Alexander,

I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for, but there was recently an article on the NY Times web site about using Dropbox for collaboration:

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/20/dropbox-will-simplify-your-life/?ref=personaltechemail&nl=technology&emc=cta1

Steve Z.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

I?m not sure if this is exactly what you?re looking for, but there was recently an article
on the NY Times web site about using Dropbox for collaboration:

Steve thanks; Dropbox is already a significant step forward from using email to exchange files, and I'm grateful that with at least some of my collaborators we've switched to that.

However, even with Dropbox, we still work with .doc files and the rest. I was wondering what kind of information management solutions exist in order to have a better perspective of structured content.

Have you looked into OneNote, Alexander? It's set up for direct collaboration, though I've never used it that way.

For sharing BrainStormWFO models, the best way is to output to text file as tab indent and then paste into freemind, then export as html.

The result is very readable.

This doesn't give editing capability, but often decisionmakers just want to read, not edit. Or they can copy-paste edits.

The important thing is that then can easily navigate and read the structure.

@ Steve: I'm rather ashamed to say that I have worked very little with Onenote as a personal tool. As a team solution it may be ideal; I had read some time ago here about the collaboration features of Onenote 2010, but I think at the time it was still in beta. I will definitely look at it. My only concern is needing to get everyone to upgrade to Office 2010 (I myself am still in 2007 in my main PC and use 2003 in other machines; apart for the price tag, I confess I never quite got used to the ribbon). It may be worth it though, especially with the 25 Gbytes available to MS Live users.

@JB: good idea; the nice thing about BrainstormUFO* exporting/importing tab-indented text is that it can be read by a multitude of applications, that can then translate it to further formats. I usually import it to TreeSheets or a mind mapper to get an overview. From Freemind or Mind Manager in particular I can get it to a hosted service like MindMeister or Mind42 (my personal preference), thereby providing editing ability to my collaborators as well. This may be indeed another option; I am personally disenchanted with mind maps but for many people they are very intuitive.


*OK, OK, I'll get it eventually...

Alexander,

I think many of the collaboration features are available in the 2007 version of OneNote, if your team has that version.

Steve Z.

Thanks to everyone who sent suggestions. Funnily enough, this discussion ties in well with another thread I myself had started two years ago "Breaking down a large Word document for sharing" http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/1370/10

The issue I then had was more specific, but in principle it remains the same: what is the most convenient way to work on a large and complex document with several collaborators, giving them easy access to the specific chapters that interest them, while still maintaining an overview? This is very similar to Jose's requirement for a notetaker using the file system for individual info items here http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/3166/0/notetaker-that-uses-the-filesystem-and-has-powerful-search

My conclusion following the two threads and some experimenting, is that there are two ways to go:

(1) Use a tool providing collaboration features and including the full content. Onenote with Skydrive or Sharepoint seems to be the most mature solutions in this area. Free/open source alternatives include wikis, Wordpress and possibly more specialised tools like Scenari http://scenari-platform.org

(2) "Render unto caesar what is caesar's" by using a tool for the overview and another for the broken-down content. This was the solution that I chose the previous time, in a way similar to Jose's. I still believe that this approach has its benefits, the main one being that collaborators don't need to learn a completely new tool, as they will do their editing in Word or Google Docs (though it will probably have to be one or the other if they share chapters among them). The individual documents would be hosted in Dropbox, Wuala or similar synchronised storage.

For the overview, an online tool like MindMeister/Mind42 or the excellent MyInfo website export should prove intuitive enough for most. The former would be preferable if collaboration is required on the actual outline, whereas the latter would be read/only (for everyone but the project manager).

I wrote:

For the overview, an online tool like MindMeister/Mind42 or the excellent MyInfo website export should prove intuitive enough for most.

I should add to the list the excellent Checkvist http://checkvist.com collaborative outliner.

By the way, after testing online mindmapping and outlining tools it seems that they cannot handle file:// links so it's not possible to link to locally hosted files for the various 'chapters', only to online repositories like Google Docs.

Sorry, Alexander, just recently read through this thread. We're currently testing Plone in-house for precisely this kind of collaboration (it's also a great outliner platform, in fact, provided you're relaxed about using a powerful CMS as an outliner!). The advantages of Plone is that (a) it's free! (b) they've made it much easier to install on a wide variety of platforms, including Linux, Windows and Mac, and (c) it has a truly great full-text search engine, which highlights hit terms as a matter of course. We're looking at replacing our Kerio Workspace system with Plone, because Kerio has failed to develop the search functionality in Workspace to the standard we require, and also because Workspace costs money ;-)

Having said that, Kerio is an incredibly easy way of doing the kind of collaboration you're suggesting, with instant updates/RSS feeds and so on. And a nice document preview feature, too...

Cheers,
Bill

About Plone and such locally installed CMS approaches, I have two questions:

- What is the textual output of such a tool? HTML plus images? RTF?

- What do you do about collaborators not working from the same office? Virtual Private Networking?

The basic version of Plone handles everything as HTML, but you can add all sorts of plug-ins, including a powerful PDF export option.

You can also add the source files in their original formats as attachments to a given page.

To give collaborators access, we use a VPN (for close colleagues) based on 1024-bit SSH (not the more standard SSL); our VPN is used 12 hours a day, hence the Fort Knox-style security (provided by the very capable WinSSH and used with their Tunnelier client). For external access by clients/suppliers etc., we use standard SSL (Plone supports SSL out of the box, as do other CMSs). We use a couple of DrayTek routers, which have fairly sophisticated port mapping capabilities.

The other solution we're testing, while not a CMS as such, has its own built-in 256-bit security. Soonr keeps documents in their original formats but allows you to preview them through its web browser view (so you don't have to download them; it's a bit like what MacOS does), and also has a full-text search function. On the downside, it doesn't highlight search terms (unlike Plone, which has a brilliant hit-term highlighting function plus advanced Boolean logic). But Soonr doesn't have to be installed on a server - it sets up its own Workplace folder on each client machine and synchronises with all of them. It also preserves your data in the Cloud, and keeps multiple versions of documents (for 6 months), just in case. This means that even without a sophisticated server/router infrastructure, you can run a very secure collegial network through Soonr, and - if you wish - copy data directly out of your workplace folder to another machine/disk/storage device for backup/audit-trail purposes.

Plone is in many respects comparable to MindTouch, but the latter has grown increasingly commercialised (both platforms are still open-source). We used to use MindTouch as an extranet (and very good it was, too), but we've grown a little uneasy at the company's long-term strategy, so decided - somewhat reluctantly - to abandon the platform.

For reference, I add a link here to a thread started two years ago by Ken (not quite sure which one of the two ;-) http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/1133/

The thread initially ellaborated on collaborative webspaces, but soon focused on Google Wave which had then just been announced That's why I find it more relevant to this thread on collaborative text development, rather than the other on project management.

Two years later, the lost opportunity that Google Wave represented makes me almost melancholic. It may have been too much too soon --a cultural shock that even people accustomed to working via the internet could not handle. But I can't help being sore at Google for not standing behind its child. I find they give too little time for their innovations to catch up --they gave Google Buzz even less time. Can anyone remember how many years it took email to become popular? Why should the product that would replace it be accepted overnight?