<$BlogRSDUrl$> Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant
Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant
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Thursday, April 09, 2009  



TextFlow - Collaboration Made Easy
http://www.textflow.com/

TextFlow is the only collaborative tool that allows concurrent work. (Several users, each working on their own version of the document.) All other systems deal with concurrent versions by trying to avoid them, either by check-in/check-out schemes or by making users work on the same version simultaneously. Concurrent work results in substantial gains in every development of text where more than one person is involved. It saves significant time, takes away the need for coordination efforts and results in a higher quality end product. This is because concurrent work gives much better support to the way people really work - parallel, iterative and less than perfectly structured. TextFlow Personal offers the same functionality as TextFlow Professional. However, TextFlow Personal is strictly for personal and non-commercial use. All documents shared using the TextFlow Personal Edition are labelled with a "not for commercial use" watermark. Currently TextFlow focuses on the early phase of text development, where the text itself is the focus. In the future they will include image handling in TextFlow. This version of TextFlow does not handle tables. Later versions of TextFlow will. TextFlow relies on a server to do document analysis, so you must be online to compare multiple documents or import Word documents. However, if you only wish to work with an active session, you can work offline. TextFlow works both in your browser and as installed software on your desktop. With the installed version you need not log in to use it, and you can drag and drop word files directly into TextFlow. They currently support .DOC, .DOCX and .RTF. TextFlow has its own format for storing work in progress, .TFX, and you can of course export back to .DOC when you are finished. The installed version of TextFlow is based on the Adobe AIR platform and thus runs on any operating system supported by AIR. Currently Adobe supports Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac OSX 10.4 (or later), and Linux. They have tested TextFlow on Windows and OSX, but not Linux. The web based version of TextFlow runs on any browser that supports Flash 9 or above. This has been added to the tools section of Research Resources Subject Tracerâ„¢ Information Blog.

posted by Marcus Zillman | 4:53 AM
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