coFFEE also known as Collaborative Face to Face Educational Environment.

coFFEE is an open source software for computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) in a digital class room. coFFEE offers a customisable tools for collaborative, knowledge sharing and presentation, such as a thread discussion form, a graphical concept mapping tool, dynamic voting and more.

coFFEE is dependent upon the internet, it works for a digital class room, where students can collaborate in groups or individuals as the whole class.

There are various tools that can be used by students to collaborate on a work and tools for the teacher to to use to create work for the whole lesson.

This video will dicuss more about coFFEE:

Introduction

The coFFEE Experience

How is this significant?

This news is significant because this new collaborative editing tool will help students and teacher to make the class room more interesting. The tools that are available are easy to use and effective. The tools that they provide are enough to collaborate with each other in the class room to make a productive lesson. The software is free of charge therefore all school with computers could easily use this software and enjoy the experience.

ProofHQ is a collaborative editing tools, that promises customers a smarter, easier way to manage review and approve design, artwork and documents. This online collaboration tool is design especially for brands, agencies, designers, print and production.

ProofHQ converts your file into a web-optimised proff to share with your reviewers. Send a proof link to your reviewers, embed a “miniproof” in a blog or wiki.

Reviewers then collaborate in reviewing your “proof” online. To make it  easier to review they are given tools like add mark-ups and comments, discuss the comments together and decide whether they should approve the proof.

This is a screenshot of the ProofHQ:

NetSketch: collaborative drawing for iPhone, Touch

SOURCE ARTICLE

Monday, August 11th 2008

Netsketch is an application that can be added for iphone and itouch. It is an application that lets users to collaborate in editing their pictures. They can also draw drawings using the netsketch canvas, which is unlimited, allowing infinite zoom to add more detail, independent of the iphone screen size. As you zoom in you could see the increase of accurace, un-aliased lines instead of large pixels. Netsketch allows full spectrum of colors and different brush sizes.

To control access, work can be set as private or only accessible to specific users. Network sharing is only available when the iphone or itouch is connect to a wireless network and can be turned off to conserve battery life.

This program is available in itunes for $6.

Here is an example of a drawing done with Netsketch:

Tim Ferguson, silicon.com

24 July 2008 09:56 AM

The UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph and Weekly Telegraph, as well as the telegraph.co.uk website. Journalish and commercial staff will be able to retrieve their emails, documents and work related stuff through the internet.

The companies tried google doc as a trial for a few weeks and some of their employee gave feedback and Paul Cheesbrough said about the feedback that;

“The feedback was, as far as IT trials go, overwhelmingly positive. People were able to find things much quicker and share things much quicker.” – TMG chief information officer Paul Cheesbrough

The staff will have the increase of inbox capacity, improve mail capabilities and calender functions.

Journalish could use Google talk instant messenger and google docs as a tool to share their information more easily and collaborate on a document.

Also it gives out good experience when you are outside the working office you still have the same experience as you are in the office.

“so that when you’re out of the office you can access data and information in the same way as you could as when you’re in the office.” – Cheesbrough

He said that google docs has made his business and other business a good way to work and collaborate in their work. It is much easier to access their need in and outside the office. They want to have the most effiecient way for their employees to be able to do what they need to do even though when their outside the office.

So google docs has made these businesses happy with google docs’s developed collaborating tools and others.

Source: ZDNet Australia

Mindquarry is an Open Source collaborative software platform for file sharing, task management, team collaboration and Wiki editing that meshes simplicity and functionality. As a result, knowledge workers are able to connect with team members and share information from wherever they are, effectively improving team-work and increasing productivity within the company.

HERE IS THE LINK TO THE VIDEO

Google’s my maps has made a collaborating feature, that lets users collaborate on their maps. Before collaborating, individuals can create their own map and plot targets on their favorite destination. They can add description on the targets to show what they are targeting on. When the feature of collaborating has been added groups of people can collaborate on one map and show their favorite places and plot them on the map simultaneously.

This helps with travelers to plan their trip. Users can plan with plotting their destination on the map. It makes it easier for them to actually see where each users want to go and where they are going to do there.

This feature not also lets users to invite people to collaborate on their map, but also allow other people to collaborate when the user put their map on “allow anyone to edit this map”. This feature also allows people to contribute on places that they think are fun, wild and interesting for other people to visit. This feature gives a sense of community to people around the world, give out interest for other people to see.

http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/images/gmapscollab.jpg

SOURCE: downloadsquade

SubEthaEdit is collaborative editing software that lets you and other people be able to edit the same text document in a networked environment in real-time. The networked environment can be anything from a LAN to the net. From this process and the final output of the program, we are able to see a text documents. This formatting we are able to see the changes that were made by the several of users, when has is changed and what was changed. This software was used for a collaborative editing session that was held.

The possibility of this software from replacing face-to-face meeting with a collaborative editing session is possible. When an outcome of the meeting is to be a document, why not work on it together instead of talking about it? This function will be a big hit with online-based companies like WaSP, as well as traditional business.

Here are some pros and cons that were made by two students who are observing a collaborative editing session:

- When there are more than 8 people collaborating it would be confusing. But it would be better if people started to give out ideas for the featured request list; things went out to be smoother than before.

- The colors could be the same between two users and would be confusing, who edited what.

- After reading the documents that was edited together, it looks like a whole lot of good ideas that are put into document that is more efficient rather than asking and gathering them and write them on a piece of paper.

- A good idea for future collaboration would be to

o Have an IRC client running for chatter

o Have two documents, one for throwing down thoughts, and one for the refined

materials

- Having a project leader that can make executive decision on what stays and go’s would be a great idea. Even thought it would make one user that their ideas aren’t good enough for the document.

- It would help if you were a fast reader and typer that is if you have a lot of contributor in one document.

- Brainstorming before writing the final document would be efficient since people can throw their ides down without being shy. Then the output of the brainstorm can be edited to form the final document.

- Compared to face-to-face collaborating method, there is less opportunity to get distracted and go off topic. If you do, there is no chance of forgetting where you got to.

- But by going away and coming back means that you’ll have no idea what’s going on while you were away.

People think that this tool would be the future, because of its real time changes; it can be put into good use such as in businesses. The only major drawback is that it is only available for OS X at the moment. If the product wants to be a big hit then they should make it to be able to run on Windows first.

SOURCE

This video is about how to use google docs and the benefit of using it. As you can see by his explanation it seems using google docs as a sharing website would be a good idea to sign up to. Its a good collaborative editing website.

Now google has made google docs that can be access offline. This video will show you how it works.

Google Brings Offline Access to Docs and Apps
Juan Carlos Perez
Monday, March 31, 2008  

Google docs and apps is free collaborative web-based software that provides a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation application. Google is trying to make an offline feature for their docs and apps, apps which include Gmail, Calendar, Talk and others.

Having offline access ability to documents is

“One of the big things they need to be competitive in the enterprise. It’s a critical step in gaining that appeal,” said Rebecca Wettemann, a Nucleus Research analyst.

As Google extends its offline ability to more applications and service it should help organizations understand how this capability be useful in the real world.

“Google should take the opportunity to talk about what are the best practices and use cases in which this approach makes sense and delivers greater value than traditional desktop applications,” Wettemann said.

The program that Google and other applications has provided a collaborating and share documents makes it easier for users because it doesn’t host the file in your pc hardware but on the web, it is easy to access and get. The project that they are trying to do, offline access, is called a Gears plug in it can store files and data locally, as well as run JavaScript applications without a server connection. It allows Docs users to work on their work processing documents if there are no internet connections or the connection has dropped. Gears may be used outside of Google developers.

To access the docs file offline is by installing gears plug-in and type in the regular Google docs URL, which is docs.google.com

When a documents is done offline is will automatically updates with the Google Docs servers when users connect to the internet.

Gears can support Internet Explorer 6 and above and Firefox 1.5 and above. This is capable for Windows XP and Vista. Firefox 1.5 and above is also supported on Mac OSX 10.2 and above and Linux. It can also run on Microsoft Windows Mobile 5 and above also in Internet Explorer 4.01 and above.

Zoho and Yahoo’s Zimbra also have the capabilities of working offline.

ARTICLE SOURCE

According to PC world, Editgrid is more powerful than google docs and zoho.com. Editgrid is a spreadsheet-only service. A good tool to share and collaborate in a particular spreadsheet. No need to exchange data and wait for it to either one to finish, you can change and share the spreadsheet simultaneously working together. Editgrid makes it easy for users by allowing them to see everyone’s spreadsheet on the web or to only co-workers that has been provided with a password. If there are different people who want to work on the spreadsheet they could, they would have asked permission to the administrator to join their work group so that they can work on the sheet at the same time.

“EditGrid even let me publish a single cell or range by assigning a Web address, which I could then insert into other Web pages, a feature that Zoho provides but Google doesn’t-at least not yet” – PC world

Editgrid provides us with the same feature buttons on the Microsoft excel 2003. Editgrid can also import or export your spreadsheet from or to be a well known file format, including, Microsoft Excel (.xls), OpenDocument (.ods), OpenOffice.org (.sxc), CSV (.csv), and many others.

In Editgrid there is a feature in which is most significant which is the Real-Time-update.

This is a snapshot of how you would see if you use editgrid
(LINK)

Editgrid gives you the opportunity to either let people work on your spreadsheet or let them only be able to see the spreadsheet. You can choose:

• Keep your spreadsheet private
• Make it readable by anyone knowing the URL
• Make it readable and writable by anyone knowing the URL
• Make it readable by anyone knowing the URL and the password
• Make it readable by anyone knowing the URL and restrict write-permission to only those who knows the password
• Make it readable and writable by anyone knowing the URL and the password

You can also pick jobs for various users that want to join your spreadsheet. You can choose what kind of access they can access or change in your spreadsheet.

EditGrid provides other utilities that can be access by the user such as:

• Sharing spreadsheets via email
• Live Chat feature so that you can chat with the other users that is collaborating in the spreadsheet
• You can organize your spreadsheet and users into Workspace. In a workspace, users are assigning in different workspaces, each user has the same spreadsheet listing, and have the same access privileges with the other users in the workspace.
• You can retrieve real time data such as stock quotes, foreign exchanges rates and other web data. Its called Remote Data.

“Remote data offers you a way to mash up financial websites like Yahoo! Finance. Live stock quotes and foreign exchange rates are updated onto your spreadsheet every 1 to 2 minutes.” – editgrid

Advance users might use this application to retrieve specific information from the web using its URL. A popular way to use a web data is to link a cell from another spreadsheet which is using the EditGrid’s cell permalink, which gets web updates every 30 minutes. Therefore the cell that was linked to that specific website will automatically update

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2250613,00.asp

http://www.editgrid.com