Multiple simultaneous editing of a document?

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There's a program for Macintosh called "SubEthaEdit." It is a text editor
that allows simultaneous editing of the document by multiple people. If you
all have the document open, you can all see the changes that the others are
making as they are making them. I have found it extremely useful in
collaborative efforts, but it is only available for Macintosh. Is such a
thing possible in the new Office? Groove seems only to be able to
synchronize finished documents...you can't both have it open at the same time
and see what the other is doing as far as I can tell. Can the new Word do
this?
 
Hi Rrhain
There's a program for Macintosh called "SubEthaEdit." It is a text editor
that allows simultaneous editing of the document by multiple people. If you
all have the document open, you can all see the changes that the others are
making as they are making them. I have found it extremely useful in
collaborative efforts, but it is only available for Macintosh. Is such a
thing possible in the new Office? Groove seems only to be able to
synchronize finished documents...you can't both have it open at the same time
and see what the other is doing as far as I can tell. Can the new Word do
this?
Click to expand...

Not that I'd heard of this.

This is difficult enough in a text editor. But with a full text
processor, with so many "auto" features, that might turn out into a
nightmare (user 1 working on a paragraph on page x, user 2 changing a
style somewhere else ---> whole document reformats, etc.).

2cents
Robert
 
Hello, Robert.

I would have to ask that you not make that decision for me. In a
collaborative environment, I would hope that the people involved would be
working together and not attempting to sabotage the work of the others by
making radical changes without letting everybody know. There could be a way
to assign permissions to those who are going to join in the document:
Administrators who can set anything with regard to the document and assign
permissions to the rest of the group, Senior Editors who can make major
format changes, Editors who can only add or delete text and do minor format
changes such as bold and italic, and Viewers who can only view the document
as it evolves in real time. Add an IM/NetMeeting connection so that people
can communicate with each other real time while they all work on the same
document. Given the potential complexity of an Office document, you may want
to include a way to "save current version" to the server (SharePoint?) in
case an accident happens and you need to backtrack: I wouldn't expect one
person's undo path to be synched across the network (at least, not at first)
so if someone accidentally makes a change and then disconnects from the
collaboration, there's a way to recover to a good version.

Google is already doing collaborative document creation with Writely, and
they're doing it with Spreadsheet, too. I would think this would be a
powerful feature to include in Office.
 
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