Git for the masses

Office already has features to track and merge different copies of documents together. Assuming you haven&#x27;t disabled it, it also has (hidden) builtin versioning, allowing a git-like three-way merge with all the accuracy improvements that entails.<p>The larger problem is, of course, discovering that these features exist and training people to use them.

Kivo looks a lot like DocVerse. Which was eventually bought by Google and became Google Cloud Connect[1].<p>Google Cloud Connect was supposedly replaced with Google Drive[2]. No idea if it offers the same functionality. There may be 100,000s of people missing Google Cloud Connect which just isn&#x27;t enough of a market for Google to pursue.<p>Personally, I don&#x27;t think the problem is lack of tools or a better way than email. It&#x27;s just lack of training or willingness to do something different.<p>[1]<a href="http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2011/02/google-cloud-connect-for-microsoft.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;googledocs.blogspot.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;02&#x2F;google-cloud-connect-...</a> [2]<a href="http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&amp;answer=3017040" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;bin&#x2F;answer.py?hl=en&amp;answer=30170...</a>

I see this problem all the time in our marketing department. I think Microsoft Office is the problem, and the solution is to move toward systems which support collaborative document editing like wikis.<p>One of my pet peeves is emailed Word documents that the author has no intention that the reader will print. I prefer to read most documents in a web browser. I consider Word documents (and PDFs) to be skeuomorphs from a time when the printed page was the only means to share information: <a href="http://baus.net/documents-are-skeuomorphic/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;baus.net&#x2F;documents-are-skeuomorphic&#x2F;</a><p>Word is convenient for the author, but not the reader. I suspect over time its use will diminish as better collaborative systems become the norm.

Re: enterprise vc, I am still horrified whenever I think about the &quot;diff tool&quot; one of our top consultants from Big Blue used when coding in Java: copy code from IDE into Word, copy the Word file across systems, reverse the process...<p>As for what you guys are doing, it&#x27;s fantastic and it was high time someone decided to tackle the problem. Another huge market opportunity is an editor tailored for writers (academia, fiction, etc), with vc embedded and an open format behind the scenes (HTML maybe).

This is the sort of problem that if you don&#x27;t solve it <i>very</i> carefully, you will get a &quot;working&quot; monstrosity that you will wish was never created in the first place.<p>See: Sharepoint. I honestly prefer emailing around files, but good luck going back to that once you&#x27;ve got sharepoint.

I&#x27;m married to a designer who spends a lot of time in Adobe products, and her team&#x27;s collaboration workflows are very similarly busted.<p>I&#x27;ve often felt like they could make great use of a version control system, and wondered why this hadn&#x27;t been done before.<p>Good luck, this looks really promising!

Installing a plugin and pressing &quot;Sync&quot; may indeed be improvement over manually merging Word docs, although they do gloss over the hairy yet important bit of managing permissions: who exactly gets access to each doc?<p>But having gotten used to Google Docs, it&#x27;s considerably more convenient -- hell, nearly magical -- to be able to <i>just work</i> and have your changes sync in real-time. For example, meeting minutes pretty much write themselves when everybody has the ability to edit the doc simultaneously and summarize what they&#x27;ve just said.

Awesome. The part about the crazy, convoluted workflow Powerpoint users go through to share changes rings so true, at least from a management consultancy perspective (I used to be one). When I was one, we weren&#x27;t allowed to use Google Docs, etc, so having this directly in Powerpoint would have been the killer feature.

My inner-management-consultant-child just shed a little tear thinking about how many times I&#x27;ve had to redo work lost to coworkers editing the wrong emailed version.

&gt;Function: Work out what has changed<p>&gt;Dev Method: git diff<p>&gt;Normal Method: Open two documents at the same time, look through to work out what the differences are.<p>I don&#x27;t think non-programmers are all manually comparing documents. In Microsoft Word, people can use any of the following methods:<p>- &quot;Track Changes&quot; when they edit<p>- use Word&#x27;s compare documents feature<p>- view Previous Versions on Word Wep App<p>- Use Sharepoint (if they&#x27;re in a large company).<p>I agree that version control is still an issue, but it&#x27;s not like nothing exists yet. I think Microsoft or Google will probably be able to improve their version-control&#x2F;collaboration tools though, so it might be hard for a third-party to beat them.

This looks neat!<p>edit: Document syncing beyond just the dumb hard drive approach is a market that is wide open. We saw the beginnings of it yesterday at Dropbox DBX and with things like LayerVault. Huge opportunity.<p>Disclaimer: I started LayerVault.

The scale of this problem is hard to overestimate. I estimate that people collectively spend 100 billion hours in PowerPoint annually. We&#x27;re tackling the same problem at LiveLoop (<a href="http://getliveloop.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;getliveloop.com</a>)... but we capture edits keystroke by keystroke so you don&#x27;t have to click &quot;sync&quot; to see each others edits. Somewhat like Etherpad inside PowerPoint. The other big problem we&#x27;ve identified is participating in PowerPoint from tablets... So we have a mobile client that also lets you see presentations in keystroke-by-keystroke realtime.

<i>&quot;You should be able to sync changes without worrying about permissions or storage locations.&quot;</i> seems to conflict a little with <i>&quot;We know how important privacy is, ...so no one except you and your team can ever access your files, not even us.&quot;</i><p>It seems to me that they&#x27;ve replaced the step of &#x27;save it in the right location&#x27; (skydrive, sharepoint, dropbox) with &#x27;open it with the right program&#x27;. I don&#x27;t see that as a benefit at all. You even lose the normal workflow of just opening a file by double clicking it.

After spending some time in the business world outside of development this is a problem I&#x27;ve been thinking a lot about as well.<p>Dropbox has slightly improved this problem but not by much.

This appears to be a git-like backend for Microsoft Office documents; initially starting with Power Point.<p>There are web based solutions from wikis, to trackers, and things like Google Docs and eversion allow many people to collaborate on a document at the same time (eversion does it in real time).

How would you compare this to LiveLoop?(<a href="http://www.getliveloop.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.getliveloop.com&#x2F;</a>) It looks like a very similar approach, is it just sans the real-time aspect?<p>(I know the LiveLoop folks, so this caught my eye.)

Any plans on spreading this to other Office formats?

I couldn&#x27;t find anything either on your features page or in the screencast - how do you handle conflicts and conflict resolution?

The ideal solution to this problem (and many others) would be using text based, human readable file formats.

scigit.com is solving this problem.

Great, congrats Zefi and Leo! This is a huge problem for a lot of real world people (non-hackers). My mom was complaining about this a couple days ago, and I told her I knew a couple great guys working on it ;)