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Team solutions #1: Text development
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Posted by MadaboutDana
Nov 9, 2011 at 12:16 PM
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
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Nov 9, 2011 at 07:23 PM
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?
Posted by MadaboutDana
Nov 10, 2011 at 05:11 PM
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.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Nov 20, 2011 at 08:15 AM
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?