Re: open office collaboration

Hi,

I think this thread might be a tad bit off topic, but:

You can do what you are thinking of today.  Run subversion as a WebDav
service, and run the Ximian OpenOffice.org branch that can save via
Gnome-vfs (which works on Webdav).  When they save a new copy, subversion
will keep the old copy.

 -- noah silva

On Thu, 10 Jul 2003, 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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