Collaborative Desktop Publishing Tools – Google Doc, Microsoft Office Live, Adobe Buzzword, Zoho
A couple of weeks ago, a colleague of mine at UBC and I successfully finished a grant application using Google Doc. It was my first time using a collaborative word processor and the experience was great. We finished the 6 pages proposal within a few days while each of us were in different locations, the only communication needed was a few phone calls. This really got me interested in the collaborative desktop publishing environments. I then did some digging and surprisingly found out there are quite a few products out there (or coming on the horizon) to accommodate the collaborative desktop publishing needs. Google Doc is obviously the first tool in the genre. Microsoft has been chasing the “Microsoft Office Live” idea since 2005, and the beta was launched just two weeks ago.
There seems to be some critical issues with the current collaborative desktop publishing tools:
- Sharing the existing documents directly from the hard drives. How can we securely share the hundreds and thousands documents from the past without uploading, converting and grant permissions?
- Offline publishing. Although internet connections are becoming more standard in our modern life styles, but there are still a huge crowd enjoys writing offline. How would the collaborative desktop publishing tool accommodate that?
- Synchronizing changes by different authors when simultaneous editing occurs is still a little flicky to me. There were several times when I see the message of my colleague is editing the document, I was reluctant to make changes at the same time. This is mainly due to I don’t see the changes he is making at the time. I would be nice to be able to see which section of the documents he is working on in real time.
Recently hyped up in the media, a new desktop publishing tool is in the launching phase. It’s called “Live Documents”, created by Sabeer Bhatia whom sold Hotmail to Microsoft back in 1997. In order to receive a beta testing account of Live Documents, you need to give them your email address and hope to “get invited”, similar to the GMail launching process. There are two reasons that I am looking into this platform:
- It is done using Flash and Flex which means the UI should be well designed and word processing transactions should be seamless.
- It offers solutions to the 3 issues listed above.
- It offers real time communication tools like chat while publishing.
Beside Live Documents, there are a few other collaborative desktop publishing platforms out there:
Zoho, an application based on the Google Gears open source platform, has been launched earlier this year. It offers offline editing. There is rumors that Yahoo is looking at Zoho and possibly looking for opportunities to acquiring this Silicon Valley and India based company.
Another one is Buzzword which is being backed up by Adobe at the moment. It was created by the Boston-based company called Virtual Ubiquity. It is currently in open beta.
There are also few other web based word processors that have the potential to compete in the "web-top applications" race: Glide Write, ajaxWrite and ThinkFree. As stated in the title, the collaborative desktop publishing era is already here, it’s time to find your right tool and give it a try.