plutext docx collaboration
Overview
The plutext solution enables many users to work on the one Word document at the same time.
Why would you want to do that? See ValueProposition
Getting Started
How it works
It does this by maintaining a master copy on a server, and replicating changes to/from individual instances of Word on users' desktops.
The 'unit of change' is a Word 2007 content control (an SDT in OOXML). A Plutext document is a docx document, in which all the content is placed in a series of content controls. Depending how the document is set up, there could be one per paragraph, or one for a sequence of paragraphs.
The client software communicates changes back to the server via SOAP.
It also periodically checks for changes on the server, and if there are any, applies those changes locally. See more details.
Architecture
The server stuff - plutext-server - is Java. It uses our docx4j library.
There are various clients:
- plutext-client-word2007 - a Word add-in, written in C#
- plutext-client-word2003 (coming soon)
- eventually, docx4all - an open source cross-platform WYSIWYG editor for docx documents - will also act as a Plutext client.
