OpenGoo: a DIY GoogleDocs-ish solution

Latest post 03-05-2009 1:16 PM by ewj. 4 replies.

OpenGoo: a DIY GoogleDocs-ish solution

02-26-2009 8:12 AM

Susan recently posted a great online doc collaboration URL on Twitter, and I thought that I would give my two cents on them, as well as link to one of the "do it yourself" solutions that I'm entertaining, OpenGoo.

Google docs is great for when you need something quick and dirty, and multiple people need to edit *and* see each others edits almost instantaneously, particularly in brainstorming sorts of scenarios.

Zoho, on the other hand, has better formatting options and has features that help crank out a more professional looking documents  (e.g. table of contents, headers, etc that are very Word-ish). One interesting feature (annoying to some, perhaps) is that two people cannot edit the same paragraph at the same time.  For major documention projects, this is not a big deal (and is maybe preferred), but for smaller brainstorming jamming sessions, it can be an eff'ing PiTA.

In the various consulting / VC circles I run with, we use Google Docs to, say, type up meeting notes and generate action items.  As those types of documents begin to solidify, someone will often take ownership of the document and then move to Zoho to start making it look more professional.  One very cool thing about Zoho is that it integrates with Google's login, so people do NOT have to create a separate account.

I do also use MS Live, but that is for really really big proposals with crazy formatting options that will get all squirrely with Zoho.  It's ok if you are heavily invested in Word, but the lack of free storage is kind of a PiTA.  I'm at a point now where I use these tools so much that I'm willing to blow a few days building my own infrastructure just so that I can have more control over my document base.

HTH!

Re: OpenGoo: a DIY GoogleDocs-ish solution

02-26-2009 12:02 PM

Looks interesting! Thanks for posting this link. I've saved it to come back to on a rainy day. I'd love to have an open-source solution which we can control on our own servers.

 

Re: OpenGoo: a DIY GoogleDocs-ish solution

02-27-2009 12:59 AM

cedcoffice:
Looks interesting! Thanks for posting this link. I've saved it to come back to on a rainy day. I'd love to have an open-source solution which we can control on our own servers.

If you use it, please let us know what you think. I'm waiting for a big lull in my projects so that I can give it a go.  I'm really hoping that it solves some collaboration issues that I'm having on some internal projects.

Re: OpenGoo: a DIY GoogleDocs-ish solution

02-27-2009 2:58 PM

I wrote a blog post about OpenGoo a few months ago after playing with the demo for about twenty minutes. It definitely looks pretty cool. If either of you (or anyone else, for that matter) would be interested in guest-blogging your experience implementing it, please let me know.

Have a good weekend,
Elliot

Re: OpenGoo: a DIY GoogleDocs-ish solution

03-05-2009 1:16 PM

I tend to want to collaborate on complex papers  with multiple type of files embedded (jpg, xls, pdf) OpenGoo rarely gave me what I wanted so I went back to Word/ email with track changes. It is much slower, but WYSIWYG is important to me.

It may have improved and this discussion is leading me to give it another try.