Re: open office collaboration

Interesting ideas here.

I think a number of folks have thought about ways for OOo to
work well with a versioned content-mangagement store.

Here's my 2 cents:
- OOo doesn't store versions, it stores changes; this somewhat
   supports collaboration, but it's best for sequential, not
   parallel work
- there are different kinds of open or standard versioned store
   (e.g. CVS, or WebDAV); these are especially good at storing
   text
- the body of an OOo document is text (XML) but it's format
   is optimised for reduced storage, not for efficient
   versioning (as in a CVS/RCS or SCCS versioned file); it
   might be best to actually store complete revisions in the
   zipped (.sx*) format
- OOo can compare different, even unrelated, documents

Given these points, I believe the main requirements for OOo are:
- store the source URI in the document (useful for offline
   editing)
- facilitate the user to to compare different revisions of a
   document by providing an additional 'compare
   version' menu item *when the original URI of a document
   is a WebDAV server*.
- OOo already supports WebDAV access, but it also needs an
   improved "file open" UI to support navigation and version
   selection (there was an earlier thread about WebDAV on the
   groupware.openoffice.org mailing lists, see
   http://groupware.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?msgId=741922&listName=dev
   as an entry point into the discussion.

Colm.
--
http://groupware.openoffice.org/glow project lead

Isaac Kriegman wrote:
> 
> Hi, I've been collaborating with a bunch of people on an opensource book
> for a while now, and I've been considering my ideal application for the
> process.  I'm wondering if such a thing exists or if anybody would be
> interested in creating it.
> 
> It will be used primarily by non-technical people, and thus DocBook and
> tex, even html, is *way* to complicated.  I've tried to get people to
> learn these thing, but for non-technical people the task is quite
> daunting, and the result is, if the projects depends on these tools it
> FAILS.  The proper solution is to let people word process like they are
> used to word processing, in a word processor like OpenOffice Writer.
> 
> The problem with OpenOffice Writer is integrating remote revision
> control, similar to cvs or subversion.  Idealy there would be a plugin
> for open office which creates an extra menu.  When you open a document
> that is under revision control, the menu appears, and under the menu are
> the standard items, such as, update and commit.  The location of the
> repository is saved in the document.  This makes contributing to the
> project as easy as downloading an OpenOffice Writer document from the
> web, opening it, editing and selecting commit from the drop down menu
> (presumably they would need to enter a username and password as well).
> 
> Then of course we would need tools for diffing and dealing with
> conflicts.  Some of those things already partially exist in OpenOffice
> with the local revision control that is built in.  Perhaps those tools
> could be extended.
> 
> I believe that a really easy to use tool along these lines would
> revolutionize book writing, and writing in general, in the way that open
> source software development has revolutionized software development.
> I've looked far and wide from something like this, but thus far have
> been unable to find anything.
> 
> Does anybody like this idea.  Does it make sense?  Should I describe
> what I'm thinking about it more detail?
> 
> - Zac
> 
> 


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