Comment on Collaborative Authoring
Way down at the bottom of the early February post Word Q & A: Tables and Charts Francis made an interesting comment to which I replied asking for more info, but I fear nobody saw either of them as they were way down on the comment list of a month old post. That being said, I've pasted Francis's comment below as well as my reply below and would love to hear everyone's thoughts.
Francis's comment:
Jason's comment about services is interesting. However, an application can lend itself to online activities without having to plug into any particular online service. E.G., consider how Word stores documents: as indivisible, single-author files. It's very hard to use them collaboratively. Wikis let numerous, geographically dispersed individuals work simultaneously on a single body of work; the same thing is nearly impossible to do with a Word document.
Case-in-point: I often work on projects where numerous persons are charged with authoring discrete sections of a final report. Word makes such groupwork very hard. The only options we have are:
a) tasking one person with hunting down and compiling the final report from scores of separate documents (enormous manpower costs, impossible to see intermediate stages of final product, revision after compilation difficult)
b) e-mailing around a master document that everybody edits (bad, unreliable, leads to people messing up layout and forking document; necessitates lots of work tracking/merging document versions and approving changes)
c) hosting the master document remotely, e.g. on a shared drive or CMS (less need to track document but otherwise same problem as above, only with file locking and access problems)
d) patching inconsistent subdocs or stitching files with fields together (very unreliable, hard to work with, and not portable)
Jonathan's reply
In response to Francis's excellent comment, I'm curious what everyone would like to see enhanced in Word in terms of collaborative document authoring. Francis suggests the ability to "…break down (and recombine/build back up) our documents simply and reliably into (from) chunks/blocks/sections/subdocuments that individual authors could work on…" I'd love to hear more details and what others think.
What type of collaborative authoring are you involved in today? What are the pain points? How would you like to see Word address them? How wouldn't you like to see Word address them?
-Jonathan
