Hello everyone,
I was wondering if there is a set of office productivity tools that are oriented in appending / editing by many users, much like google docs work, where you can share a file and even work on it simultaneously with others.

Is there such a suite that I can install in a personal server, rather than using google docs and other similar solutions?

Here we only use good old KISS tools for docs, meaning Open Office installed on any client (Linux, Windows, Mac OS X) and then all the files on a big fat local Samba server. Works great every day.

but how do you deal with simultaneous opening of files?
how do you deal with share on demand??

There are a number of groupware suites out there, generally web-based, IIRC. I looked at a few some years back, but I'm not really up to date now, so all I can suggest is some Googling.

Google purchased EtherPad (http://etherpad.com/) which, afaik, formed the basis of the live-editing feature of Wave. This is now open source and deployable, although idk what state it's in when you get it out of the box. There are various deployments of etherpad around if you wanted to try it out.

Speaking of box, there is also the Wave-in-a-box project (http://incubator.apache.org/wave/) that gives you ... uh, Wave. In a box. I adore Wave, but so far haven't been brave enough to try and run my own server.

A quick google on "multiuser edit" turns up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collabo...al-time_editor which has a nice list of things that might help.

Good luck!
- Piete.

1 members found this post helpful.

I guess I was missing the right search term - i was looking for 'open free office suite tools'. really not the best terms, which explains this thread

Thank you!

You could do worse. A woman friend of mine, who lives nearby in the South French countryside, has a farm with quite many animals. She spends much time in the stables, and very little time in front of her computer. A while ago, she had some trouble when a whole sisterhood of young dogs were "en chaleur" (in heat) long before their due time. She decided to consult the Internet for some veterinarian advice and innocently typed "jeunes chiennes en chaleur" into the search engine. The literal translation would be "young bitches in heat". I'll let you imagine the colorful results.

egroupware allows users to edit and collaborate with each other. the only thing is, you'd want to use a native client to do the actual changes, then upload the doc's. but files can easily be shared, tagged and known who changed it. take a look at their site. if you need help setting it up, start a new thread (I guess in a diff forum here at LQ) and I can walk you (and others) thru it.

is Group Office a possibility? (Don't actually know anything about it, but the article sounded promising.)

Never tried this but it may be a help to you
http://www.muktware.com/3972/manage-...cs-libreoffice

John

Good One!
Thanks for the chuckles!

This may be of help:
http://help.libreoffice.org/Common/C...ring_documents