With the Alfresco show-stoppers now behind us, we’ve packaged plutext-server as an Alfresco Module Package (AMP). The idea is that in due course, it will be easy to deploy plutext-server into an existing Alfresco implementation. See Integrating plutext-server into Alfresco for details.  Given that we’re going down the Alfresco road, we now also have a project on the Alfresco forge.  Mostly, that will direct existing Alfresco users here.

At the moment, it is still too hard to try out plutext:

• You have to build your own plutext-server, because there is no web-based user self registration for our test server.  This will change in the next fortnight.
• Building your own plutext-server isn’t too hard if you are a Java developer, but we’ll make that easier as well.  We’re building a VMware appliance which you’ll be able to download, which contains a preconfigured development environment.  Unless you are really keen, you may as well wait for that.
• Currently, you have to build a Word 2007 add-in to interact with the plutext server.  Soon this will be a downloadable executable.

So that’s the agenda for the next couple of weeks.  Cheers!

A quick post to flag that there is some good content in the wiki now to help developers get started with the Word 2007 client:

• the instructions for setting up your Visual Studio 2005 environment, which I linked to in the previous post
• new end user instructions for using the client (including screenshots).

I’ve uploaded the plutext-client-word2007 source code to subversion.  Let me say up front that right now, this is for developers, not end users.  Here are instructions for setting up your Visual Studio 2005 environment.

This is the add-in for Word 2007 which lets you collaborate with other people on a docx document.  I’ll post some screenshots to the website tomorrow.
At the moment, you need a plutext-server (BYO or use our development server).  It also helps to have some collaborators, though you can open the document twice in Word and collaborate with yourself.  All collaborators currently have to be using Word 2007 with the add-in - a Word 2003 add-in is currently under development.