[ale] Question: Transparent document sharing over the Internet

[Jay Loden]

Well, since I don't see anyone else suggesting this: 
Maybe a wiki?  I've heard of several businesses out there using wikis or forms 
of them. They have shared document capability, revision history, and capacity 
to deal with word documents as uploaded files. 

You could set up a server with something like Plone ( http://plone.org ) or a 
wiki on it and they can log in from the road and edit/revise/share documents 
with full revision history. Depending on the exact needs of the group, you 
could even have them edit the documents as wiki pages, and make an export 
function that turns the wiki page into an rtf file for use with Word. 

That way they can edit online, export, edit offline, and merge changes back in 
with simple copy and paste. I'm more familiar with Plone than a straight 
wiki, but I know Plone has the capability to copy and paste formatted text 
from a word document and preserve the formatting. 

It might be more complicated than what you're looking for, but it would 
certainly fit the bill, and it'd be pretty scaleable.

-Jay

On Tuesday 07 June 2005 02:29 pm, Jason Smith wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> This is not strictly a Linux question as much as a
> general technology question.
>
> Problem : Transparent document sharing
>
> 1. I have a few colleagues who often travel to client
> sites.
> 2. While away and also while in the office, they
> create documents on their (Windows) laptops.
> 3. I would like to set things up so that the latest
> version of project related documents on their laptops
> are available to the rest of the (local) team.
> 4. It would be best if this happened
> transparently/automatically ;as requiring someone to
> manually check in their documents does not seem to be
> effective.
> 5. While working on their laptop they are not always
> connected to the Internet ... so the synchronization
> mechanism needs to occur whenever they do connect to
> the Internet.
>
> Solutions
> 1. I was thinking of simple solutions like a script
> that woke up every 5 mins and would scp the documents
> over / send an email with the document as an
> attachment and so on.
>
> Are there more elegant non-obstrusive ways of doing
> this ?
>
> Thanks
> Coward
>
>
>
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