On 09/24/2010 11:43 AM, Les Denham wrote:
On Friday 24 September 2010 10:29:10 Rob Oakes wrote:
Anyone else have any thoughts?
Rob,
I had no idea people were asking for this kind of feature. Real-time
collaboration on a document seems to me to be a formula for a colossal waste
of time, extending the concept of endless meetings to an online equivalent.
In the organizations I'm involved in, written documents of all kinds seem to
be actively discouraged by most managers. The most common kind of "report" is
an incoherent PowerPoint presentation put together with thought processes and
artistic taste worthy of a four-year-old.
Writing of any kind is so rare I can't imagine there being any demand for
collaborative writing.
I have to confess that I too am somewhat puzzled by this, but I can see
a use case that would be good for me. Say I've written a paper with a
collaborator. We are now at a pretty late stage in the process. It might
be useful to be able to read through the document together and make
changes we can both see "in real time". I'm not saying this really would
be all that great, but I can see using it.
Still, I have to agree with Rob that doing this at the level of each
program just seems wrong in principle. Having some very generic
client-server model, where the program's display could show up here
there and everywhere, and the program could take its input too from
various sources, that would be much more general and much more useful.
That said, if we're talking *nix, I wonder how hard it would be to use
LyX's multiple windows feature to implement some kind of collaborative
editing. You only need to get that second window onto your
collaborator's screen somehow.
Richard
