Re: [trans-ws] Collaborative editing of the spec

From
<>
Date
2004-09-28T09:09:36+00:00
ID
Thread
Re: [trans-ws] Collaborative editing of the spec
From what I understand of the Wiki software
that I used, it can export HTML files, LaTeX and PDF.  However, I
have not yet gotten either the LaTeX or PDF to work properly, but the HTML
export seems to work OK.  I'm sure that it will still require a little
post-editing, but I would guess nothing too onerous.

As for Gerard's suggestion - I'm afraid
that our internal standard is Office 2000, not 2003, so that suggestion
is a non-runner for me.

S

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Stephen Flinter

Connect Global Solutions

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--------------------------------------------

Tony Jewtushenko <>

27/09/2004 18:32

Please respond to



To

Arle Lommel <>

cc

"Reynolds, Peter"
<>, Magnus Martikainen <>,
, 

Subject

Re: [trans-ws] Collaborative
editing of the spec

Hi all: 

I use Wiki all the time,  and it's great for collaboration and brainstorming.
 It takes very little time to get up to speed with it.  It would
be good idea to break the document into main topics as the "locking"
mechanism for Wiki is pretty poor and while version information is always
preserved,  when contention occurs the versions can get jumbled up.
 

I also believe Wiki is not appropriate for a final outward document,  so
there will need to be a migration effort to something more format friendly
and permanent (I prefer HTML).

Regards,

Tony

Arle Lommel wrote:

Hi all,

at LISA we use wikis internally for a lot of communication, and have found
them vastly superior to Word for the authoring phase of documents because
they eliminate the frequent problem of multiple people working from different
versions of documents and moving in different directions.

If anyone wants to see how wikis work, go to Wikipedia and look up some
of those pages. You can contribute your own content to almost any of the
pages, and you can edit them, but they can also be rolled back. That is
probably the single most significant deployment of wiki anywhere.

The drawbacks of wikis are that they are more cumbersome to edit than a
Word doc, and that it is a new technology that people have to learn. That
said, for most basic editing, wiki syntax is very simple and you could
learn it in a matter of minutes for simple edits. More complex edits can
require more learning, but should not be bad. 

An additional potential drawback is that most wikis do not have the capability
of exporting into other formats cleanly (and may even produce “strange”
HTML), which means that it is usually best to strip all formatting and
reapply in the target format after the text is completed, which can be
time-consuming. However, if the group is comfortable maintaining only electronic
HTML copy on the web for the spec’s master, then there is no problem with
using the wiki, which becomes, effectively, a simple CMS with an integrated
authoring environment, and the document can be deployed on the web.

-Arle

Reynolds, Peter <>
scripsit

Hi Magnus, Stephen, All,

I was waiting for Reinhard to have a look at this. He was the person who
expressed a preference for using word rather than learning new technologies.
I spoke with him on Wednesday and suggested he talk with Stephen but he
was in the middle of the LRC conference which he organises so I am not
sure that he got around to this. I think if we are all agreed that this
would be a good system we can just go ahead with it, but I would like to
hear Reinhard's comments.

Thanks,

Peter.

From: Magnus Martikainen [mailto:]

Sent: 24 September 2004 18:09

To: ;


Subject: RE: [trans-ws] Collaborative editing of the spec

-- 

Tony Jewtushenko              
               
               
               
     

Principal Product Manager - Oracle Application Development Tools

Oracle Corporation, Ireland

mailto:

Direct tel: +353.1.8039080            
    

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