Talk:Online document services

Linked to existing article

This seems a good application to list in Convergence of communications. Let me know if you think it fits.

I also had collaborative document writing in mind. Do you see that as part of this service (e.g., where one participant can literally mark up a draft and circulate the change), or should collaborative applications such as wikis be a separate line item? Howard C. Berkowitz 22:22, 27 July 2008 (CDT)

Yes, its appropriate to be listed in Convergence of communications.

Although both are collaborative tools, I feel that wikis are a different category. Wikis involves editing and publishing content on web pages whereas Online document service is collaborating by allowing users to edit documents in various formats(like doc,ppt,xls,html etc.). Google docs, ThinkFree etc are different from wikis. They are using a different approach to achieve somewhat similar goals. Gaurav Banga 03:18, 30 July 2008 (CDT)

I agree with you. These would be good points to have in the intoduction of this article. Often, I find that it is important, in using the introduction to an article to set the context, to define what the topic is not, because unless the reader is "forced" to see what is unique about the topic, it's too easy for the reader to fall into assumptions and not see your point.

For a very different topic, you can look at something I just wrote on infantry fighting vehicles that established what they are not.

One thing I still don't understand about ODS is how change control works. Is there a change control method assumed, such as programmers use with sccs, rcs, etc.? Otherwise, at least with wikis, unless the articles are quite small, active collaboration leads to lots of edit conflicts.

I don't know if you consider it part of ODS, but I have found it very useful for several people, audioconferenced together, to be able to mark up PPT on on desktop to which all can have. It's long enough ago that I don't remember the tool, but it might have been NetMeeting. There were no edit conflicts, because only one copy of the PPT was open (always save before starting a markup collaboration, and then save frequently)Howard C. Berkowitz 04:44, 30 July 2008 (CDT)

General and editorial comments

I think I'm getting a better idea what you have in mind, which might be closer, in some definitions, to "collaborative markup." It's easy enough to share a document in read-only mode, but to be able to mark it up is much more of a challenge. In the past, one of the hard parts of such an application was change control: only one user at a time can mark up a document, or you get some very confused copies, or the equivalent of a WikiMedia "edit conflict". The original UNIX application that made this happen was sccs: source code control system, although there are many newer versions.

It would help if you could include a section with a representative use case: assume Bob creates the document and wants Carol, Ted and Alice to comment on it. Ted and Alice's comments are independent, but Carol would comment only after seeing Alice's changes. How would this work? How does the application keep Ted and Alice having an edit conflict?

A brief comment on how the sharing physically works (i.e., with respect to protocols would help. If there is change control, I doubt it could be a distributed peer-to-peer protocol such as Torrent? Is it HTTP/HTML based as is MediaWiki?

Is there an option to send a message to all users of a document when a change is made, as there is email notification of changes to a monitored CZ article?

As to it being "absolutely free", there are costs with running the service. How are these handled? Paid advertising, as with many web sites? Sales of the markup software, such as Microsoft Office?

Just a writing suggestion -- the article sounds like a presentation, partially because it contains references to "we" and so forth. While the prose of an encyclopedia article need not be dull, it isn't written as if it is a conversation or presentation.

Howard C. Berkowitz 10:59, 28 July 2008 (CDT)