Tom Austin

Have you ever sent out a word document to several people for their review and revisions only to then struggle with multiple overlapping edits in 6 to 8 different word-doc versions of the document that you have to piece together? What can you do? With Microsoft Word, you have to do multiple pair-wise comparisons but you don’t get the chance to easily compare multiple proposed changes to the same copy. Is there any hope for an easy way to do this?

This morning, I was pleasantly surprised by a startup’s technology. (This, of course, is not a formal Gartner position, only a personal comment and it’s not an endorsement, either, only the starting point for a discussion of "collaborative editing".)

I came across “TextFlow” (http://textflow.com/) and spoke with Tomer, their CEO. I also watched the online demo and played around with the free version of the tool.

TextFlow presents a very interesting approach to dealing with the results of email-document-revisions coming in from hither and yon. (This is the primary way people — including Gartner analysts — collaborate on a doc.)

To do some hands-on experimentation, I signed up for a personal test on their web site and installed the desktop version (which uses AIR) to get full drag and drop capabilities.

On the side, I took a word-doc (a draft research note) and spawned two edited-variants of the draft. Three files in hand, I dropped the first one in as the baseline case and then the other two and asked TextFlow to compare versions.

Doesn’t Microsoft Word do that?

Yes, but what happens when you ask it to compare multiple versions (not just 2)? Word only compares two docs. If you want to add a third to the mix, you have to save the result of the first compare and then compare that result to the third doc file *but only if you have accepted all the proposed changes in the first set of differences*! The net is Word doesn’t deal well with multi-document comparisons!

TextFlow positives:

• This works!
• It’s EASY to use, particularly the desktop version.
• It deals well with multiple files (to a limit, of course…) within a pretty clean presentation layer. [I only tested three doc variants; I suspect the UI will be challenged to go beyond simultaneously comparing several files.]

TextFlow not so positives:

• It’s YAA – yet another application! (ARG)
• It doesn’t deal with formatting/layout changes – it’s using an analytic (pattern matching) approach that only looks at the content (this may be OK – you don’t want to use this tool for final copy editing) but the early version I played with doesn’t seem to do a great job of retaining formatting/layout either.
• Tiny vendor, early stage startup.
• Their PR was confusing – I at first assumed it was another instance of what you can do with Google Docs. Wrong – it’s a different value proposition. They need to figure out how to articulate it more clearly.

Alternatives:

Beyond manually comparing several document variants (a typical chore we all deal with), there are tools that support simultaneous-multi-party-editing of the same document. Some provide for component locking at the section level; others, such as Google Docs and Microsoft OneNote 2007 provide for pseudo-realtime simultenaous editing with no (apparent) locking. Let’s call this the realtime-free-for-all model. This realtime capability performs best when it really works in realtime (so you can see someone else editing the sentence you’re writing).

Realtime free-for-alls have their place. They work.

They’re not for everyone and they don’t replace email document "fan-out" and "fan-in" collaboration.

That’s where a tool like TextFlow seems to fit well.

What are your collaborative editing needs?

Do you use realtime-free-for-all tools? (Google Doc seems to have fewer latency issues than OneNote but both need to improve.)

How dominant is email scatter-gather editing?

Net:

What TextFlow does is clearly a better model for consolidating multiple drafts sent and received in email. (Are there others?)

Realtime-free-for-all editing is clearly a better model in other cases.

Multi-authoring (as in section locking) is another alternative — but it can degenerate as well.

What would *really* be cool is if something like TextFlow were integrated into a collaborative word processor that provided for realtime-free-for-all editing sessions (with locking perhaps at the word level) and could import edited versions sent in via email.

What do you think???