[Tfug] Collaborative editing environments?

[Claude Rubinson]

On Sat, Mar 26, 2011 at 10:18:56PM -0700, Tom Rini wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 26, 2011 at 9:28 PM, Zack Williams <zdwzdw at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Dropbox! The barrier to entry is extremely low: it behaves just like a
> >> normal folder in the filesystem. Revision control and collaboration
> >> are built in, and 2G accounts are free.
> >
> > Dropbox selectively sends some of your data in the clear (specifically
> > filenames and other metadata), and has had quite a few security issues
> > in the past.    Use at your own risk.
> 
> And solves a different problem.  Or at least, doesn't address the
> format problems of OOo<->MS (and presumably getting everyone on OOo
> was ruled out).

I don't think that getting everybody on OOo wouldn't really solve the
problem, even if it were possible.  My experience has been that the
documents produced by all word processors are just a mess.  I know
that I have certain files that OOo will reformat every time it opens
them.  Sharing the files just aggravates the problem.  So that's the
appeal of a centralized/cloud solution--we'll all see and be editing
the same thing.  And the associated question is whether there are any
worthwhile competitors to Google Docs?

Incidentally, and I don't know that this matters, but the target
format is actually RTF (rather than DOC, ODF, or even PDF).  The
reason being that RTF files can be written in such a way as to
including templating information for citations and bibliographies.

C.