Last Thursday I demo’d our Plutext collaboration system to an audience of lawyers and legal technologists and some old friends at the Victorian Society for Computers & the Law’s Legal Technology Conference 2008.

The accompanying presentation is here (pdf).

Our approach to collaboration means you will never be told your document is locked or checked out by someone else.

This in itself is a great step forward for many long-suffering users of traditional document management systems.

I’m collecting screenshots of locked / checked-out messages from different document management systems.  So next time this happens to you, please email it to me.  I’m jason, that’s at plutext.org.  Thanks.

In comment 18 to comment of the day “Google Docs is Chock Full of Fail” by Karim on Read/Write web, Bernard Lunn says:

if you drew a magic quadrant with “control over presentation/formatting” on one axis and “rapid online collaboration” on the other, neither MS Office or GOOG Apps would be in the magic quadrant

That’s precisely the quadrant we’re aiming for with plutext. We still have a way to go

Anonymous comment 4 to Scoble’s contribution to the debate also articulates our reason for being:

I’ve found Google Docs is great for collaborative editing. Once everyone’s done editing then it’s up to someone to take the Google Docs version and properly format the doc using a desktop word processor.

Based on this observation, Google needs to completely clone a desktop word processor or focus on perfecting collaboration

Well, the VMware appliance is mentioned in my last post is now available.

Its a great way for prospective developers to examine docx4all, and also an easy way for people to work on Alfresco.

The appliance is built around Ubuntu’s JeOS (’Just enough Operating System’), and Eclipse, which also means a desktop (for which we chose Xfce).

A stack of pre-built open source software delivered as an appliance which runs in a free container (eg VMware Server or Player) on your operating system of choice reduces to pretty much zero the cost for new developers to get started.

Its a pity we can’t deliver a similar appliance for developers wanting to work on our Word 2007 add-in - developers need Visual Studio, VSTO and Word 2007;  it would be great if Microsoft gave their blessing to a freely downloadable virtual appliance which contained these things (perhaps they could ensure that the only way you could launch Word was by running your application from Visual Studio).

That’s why I didn’t mention plutext-server in the second paragraph (even though you can install it into Alfresco with a single command).  Currently, you really need the Word 2007 add-in to work with plutext-server.  The barriers to entry for plutext client developers are one of the reasons we’re working to make docx4all a fully functioning plutext-client.  Stay tuned!  In the meantime, we’ll provide an easy installer for the Word 2007 add-in, so at least you can try the system end-to-end - provided you’ve got Word 2007.

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!

Twelve days ago, I checked out Alfresco.

I thought Alfresco would be a good way to get access control sorted out. There are a number of other features in Alfresco which might prove interesting down the track, but access control was the immediate priority. Alfresco provides each user with a home directory, and lets invite other people to access their resources.

I also think that plutext-style document collaboration would be a great fit for many of Alfresco’s customers. Like most other document management systems, Alfresco uses the classic check-out/check-in model (detested by users the world over!). plutext collaboration frees users from that paradigm.

By Monday, a week in, plutext was basically working with Alfresco. This included the Word 2007 add-in authenticating itself when it makes web service calls (something I hadn’t implemented before). I found a few little bugs in Alfresco which I reported (here and here), but everything was going remarkably smoothly.

Sweet, I thought I’d have a relaxed Tuesday, checking the code in, updating the build and wiki, before declaring success in a blog post.

Well, that wasn’t to be. It turns out there are some major issues (here and here) with Alfresco’s JCR support and/or repository which need to be resolved. Its not so easy to identify simple test cases, since they seem to arise when a series of operations are performed in one session after another, and manifest themselves sometime later, but at least the problems are repeatable.

Hopefully the Alfresco guys will get onto these problems quickly. Otherwise I will have to learn more about Alfresco internals and its use of Hibernate than I’d care to!

Early next week (a week later than I expected) I will update the build procedures so you can easily build it for Alfresco, and then I’ll make sure it works with Jackrabbit again (we’d like to have a single content model that works for both repositories - more on that later).

If we can make good headway with the issues in Alfresco over the next week, we’ll probably regard that as our flagship configuration. If not, I’ll take another look at building access control around Jackrabbit. Although Jackrabbit lacks Alfresco’s bells and whistles, my experience with it (in the single user load scenarios which are causing Alfreco problems) was trouble free. That’s not to say I expect it to be perfect under heavy load, but it sounds very promising based on what Jukka wrote recently following the announcement of version 1.4.

10 days ago, we created a proof of concept for using JAXB on a subset of wml.xsd (one of the OpenXML schema files).

We’ve declared that a success, and moved it from a branch into the trunk of docx4j. Here be the generated classes.

plutext-server has now been migrated to use it.

And Jo is working with it as he codes docx4all.

So we’re pretty committed at this point!

We’re tidying up bits of the object model as we go (ie editing our xsd to generate Java that we like). So far, paragraphs (p, pPr, r, rPr, t) and structured document tags (sdt, sdtPr, sdtContent) have had our attention.

We’re also making a few changes to the generated classes, so we need to think about how best to prevent those changes from getting lost when the classes are re-generated. There’s a bit of support in XJC for this, and diff may come in handy, but I’d love to hear best practices.

What we have now is an object model for key pieces of the Main Document part (document.xml), in package name
org.docx4.jaxb.document. Next cab off the rank is the Styles part, which we’ll put in org.docx4.jaxb.styles.

The plutext solution enables many users to work on the one Word document at the same time.

Why would you want to do that?

The way we put it in the Wiki:

1. Get documents finished ahead of deadline. Sales proposals, contracts, reports. Our focus is real time simultaneous collaboration - two or more people working on the document at the same time.
2. Plutext allows you to continue to use Microsoft Word as your editing environment. You know how to use Word (at least until you installed Office 2007 anyway..).
3. So you can format the document using Microsoft Word. If you did your collaboration in Google Docs, chances are you’ll have to bring it back into Word to make it pretty. Our collision handling is nicer to.
4. Work offline. It’s Word, after all.
5. Word’s docx is our native document format. So there is 100% fidelity. No numbering going haywire.
6. Complete version history / audit trail.
7. Don’t have Word? Coming soon … Use docx4all, our WYSIWYG docx editor - on a Mac, on Linux etc.
8. Oh, and its open source. All GPL 3 (Affero GPL 3 in the case of the server side bits). Use our server (developers only for now), or build your own.

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.

The plutext-server code is now checked in.

Actually I checked it in on Friday, but I’ve spent the weekend wrestling with Axis 2 - first, to specify a Maven 2 POM which deploys the correct JARs; and second, to have Eclipse WTP deploy the web service to it (rather than talking in Axis 1 terms).  See notes in the wiki.

The Word 2007 client will follow next week, at which point you’ll be able to set up both client and server in your development environment, and collaborate on some documents!

The release 7 days ago of the GNU Affero General Public License v3  was perfectly timed, because I wanted to use a GPL-like license for the plutext server code, but without the SAAS loophole.

And so a few days behind  Fabrizio’s announcement, you can actually see the license on our code