6 ms·
Git for the masses
- nwenzel 13y agoMy inner-management-consultant-child just shed a little tear thinking about how many times I've had to redo work lost to coworkers editing the wrong emailed version.
- zefi 13y agowe'd love to help!
- merlincorey 13y agoThis appears to be a git-like backend for Microsoft Office documents; initially starting with Power Point. There are web based solutions from wikis, to trackers, and things like Google Docs and eversion allow many people to collaborate on a document at the same time (eversion does it in real time).
- zefi 13y agoWe're starting off where we know people really have the problem - with MS office files stacked away on old network drives. In the long run we want to integrate with any file type - Photoshop, CAD etc. Wherever there's currently v1, v2, v3, v5_tommy_edit2 we think there's room for improvement.
- zachlatta 13y agoHow do you plan to manage changes in binary files?
- zefi 13y agoOffice docs can be exported to xml. Wherever possible we serialise to a git friendly format, if this isn't possible we'll version the binary itself. But we'd love any tips you have!
- derekp7 13y agoSo if you diff xml docs, will users be expected to read the raw xml diff output? Or, is there enough documentation on the file formats available so that when you diff two Word docs, for example, that you can create a third doc using Word's "show revisions" feature?
- pea 13y agohey derek, Leo here -- I'm CTO at kivo. So, although the PowerPoint COM API is super old and buggy, the OpenXML standard which has been around since Office 2007 is actually pretty advanced. This means that you can realistically diff two versions of a file and extract and analyze the changes. The C# wrapper for this is also good (the hard bit is actually serializing the slide from COM -> OpenXML in memory). We would never expect our users to read the XML!
- mesozoic 13y agoAfter spending some time in the business world outside of development this is a problem I've been thinking a lot about as well. Dropbox has slightly improved this problem but not by much.
- zefi 13y agoping me on zefi@kivo
- cmbaus 13y agoI see this problem all the time in our marketing department. I think Microsoft Office is the problem, and the solution is to move toward systems which support collaborative document editing like wikis. One of my pet peeves is emailed Word documents that the author has no intention that the reader will print. I prefer to read most documents in a web browser. I consider Word documents (and PDFs) to be skeuomorphs from a time when the printed page was the only means to share information: http://baus.net/documents-are-skeuomorphic/ http://baus.net/documents-are-skeuomorphic/ Word is convenient for the author, but not the reader. I suspect over time its use will diminish as better collaborative systems become the norm.
- jlgreco 13y agoThis is the sort of problem that if you don't solve it very carefully, you will get a "working" monstrosity that you will wish was never created in the first place. See: Sharepoint. I honestly prefer emailing around files, but good luck going back to that once you've got sharepoint.
- zefi 13y agocompletely agree, we'd love your help. I'm on zefi@kivo.com
- mattclifford 13y agoAwesome. The part about the crazy, convoluted workflow Powerpoint users go through to share changes rings so true, at least from a management consultancy perspective (I used to be one). When I was one, we weren't allowed to use Google Docs, etc, so having this directly in Powerpoint would have been the killer feature.
- lygaret 13y agoI couldn't find anything either on your features page or in the screencast - how do you handle conflicts and conflict resolution?
- zefi 13y agoAt the moment we don't do anything automatic. We display all the previous versions on a slide by slide basis within PowerPoint. We don't know yet what the right way to do this is, but we'd love your input - I'm zefi@kivo.com
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jonchang 13y agoOffice already has features to track and merge different copies of documents together. Assuming you haven't disabled it, it also has (hidden) builtin versioning, allowing a git-like three-way merge with all the accuracy improvements that entails. The larger problem is, of course, discovering that these features exist and training people to use them.
- zefi 13y agoWe're trying to make performing these actions simpler than they currently are. Would love any feedback or ideas.
- cmbaus 13y agoI don't think those diffs are centrally managed though, which is a big problem.
- jervisfm 13y agoOffice used to have a rather handy (well-hidden) builtin versioning feature whereby new saves were not permanent. Instead only what changed was saved in a delta-fashion and so one could go back and access the different versions of a file (from different times) all in the same file. This feature was good for the case of a solo author who working on a draft document and needing to keep various versions of the documents in one file (as opposed to having multiple versions with potentially funny names depending on the naming-scheme in use). Unfortunately, MS removed this feature way back when Office 2007[1] was released. OS-level file versioning functionality that exists can help fill the void though. [1] - http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/what-happened-to-versioning-HA010219332.aspx http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/what-happened-to...
- discodave 13y agoOne problem with the office track changes feature is that ALL PREVIOUS VERSIONS OF THE DOCUMENT ARE INSIDE THE DOCUMENT. This is wrong, the document should be inside the VCS. Some examples that my mother brought up regarding Law firms and the track changes feature are that if somebody writes 'adding this paragraph because of idiot customer X' or repurposes a document for customer Y into a document for customer X then some bright beaver at customer X turns on the track changes feature... I'm sure there is a way to scrub the changes from the document before sending it but not separating the content from the history will always create problems.
- jacalata 13y ago"You should be able to sync changes without worrying about permissions or storage locations." seems to conflict a little with "We know how important privacy is, ...so no one except you and your team can ever access your files, not even us." It seems to me that they've replaced the step of 'save it in the right location' (skydrive, sharepoint, dropbox) with 'open it with the right program'. I don't see that as a benefit at all. You even lose the normal workflow of just opening a file by double clicking it.
- zefi 13y agoSorry, we're probably not clear. You can still open your documents just by double clicking on them. If you and I were working on a deck and I stored the flie on dropbox and you on your desktop - we could both double click on the pptx files and they would open. Let me know if I've misunderstood you.
- jacalata 13y agoSo why the convoluted method of opening in the video then, and the emphasis that I should open it as a kivo file? If I just open it in powerpoint and save changes am I still getting the versioning and updates shared to my friend? If we have it stored in two different places, how do the changes get to his file on his dropbox where I don't have access?
- zefi 13y agoSo when he makes a change to the file, that edit is synced to a git repo that you have access to, your desktop document (via kivo) is polling that repo for changes and when it sees one pulls it down and displays it within powerpoint
- andrewguenther 13y agoAny plans on spreading this to other Office formats?
- zefi 13y agoyep, we're working on word next. Sign up on the site and we'll keep you updated. Do you think that's the best Office format to tackle next?
- ryanackley 13y agoKivo looks a lot like DocVerse. Which was eventually bought by Google and became Google Cloud Connect[1]. Google Cloud Connect was supposedly replaced with Google Drive[2]. No idea if it offers the same functionality. There may be 100,000s of people missing Google Cloud Connect which just isn't enough of a market for Google to pursue. Personally, I don't think the problem is lack of tools or a better way than email. It's just lack of training or willingness to do something different. [1]http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2011/02/google-cloud-connect-for-microsoft.html http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2011/02/google-cloud-connect-... [2]http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=3017040 http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=30170...
- zefi 13y agoYou're right, ease of adoption is the no. 1 barrier to products like ours and docverse. We know that to make this work, it needs to be at most two or three steps to be fully set up and working with someone else, and then very little effort from then on. No one has made it this simple yet. Also, we're doing slide by slide version control, rather than snapshots of the whole document. People emailed themselves files before dropbox, but since dropbox I've never done that. That's the kind of ux needed to make any product solving this problem succeed.
- qq66 13y agoIf you try to use Google Cloud Connect you'll find that it's too buggy to use for more than 15 minutes.
- wittysense 13y agoIf I smash my keyboard I perhaps produce a program; if I smash a piece of paper I produce a program.
- namank 13y agoscigit.com is solving this problem.
- pervycreeper 13y agoThe ideal solution to this problem (and many others) would be using text based, human readable file formats.
- cdcarter 13y agoThat doesn't sound ideal, that sounds subpar but easier. A human readable text based PPT sounds atrocious!
- discodave 13y agoThis doesn't mean that people have to edit in text editors. Anyway, having non-proprietary file formats is more important than being human readable. For this reason and others.
- smacktoward 13y agoLike the XML-based formats that MS Office has used as its default for saving documents since 2007? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
- withinthreshold 13y agoIsn't it zipped? Can Git really handle .docs? Would be great!
- kellysutton 13y agoThis looks neat! edit: Document syncing beyond just the dumb hard drive approach is a market that is wide open. We saw the beginnings of it yesterday at Dropbox DBX and with things like LayerVault. Huge opportunity. Disclaimer: I started LayerVault.
- zefi 13y agohuge fans of what you guys are up to. what's the best way to get in touch?
- argumentum 13y agoGreat, congrats Zefi and Leo! This is a huge problem for a lot of real world people (non-hackers). My mom was complaining about this a couple days ago, and I told her I knew a couple great guys working on it ;)
- ludoo 13y agoRe: enterprise vc, I am still horrified whenever I think about the "diff tool" one of our top consultants from Big Blue used when coding in Java: copy code from IDE into Word, copy the Word file across systems, reverse the process... As for what you guys are doing, it's fantastic and it was high time someone decided to tackle the problem. Another huge market opportunity is an editor tailored for writers (academia, fiction, etc), with vc embedded and an open format behind the scenes (HTML maybe).
- pea 13y agohey ludoo - cheers for the reply; my name is Leo and I'm CTO @ kivo. Re for a version for writers, would this entail MS Word? We are planning to ship our Word version in the near future and it would be great to get your feedback on what you would like this to look like (leo@kivo.com). All Office files post-2007 actually do have the open format of OpenXML behind them, so we can totally see this being a reality.
- joebadmo 13y agoI'm married to a designer who spends a lot of time in Adobe products, and her team's collaboration workflows are very similarly busted. I've often felt like they could make great use of a version control system, and wondered why this hadn't been done before. Good luck, this looks really promising!
- ibejoeb 13y agoIt's been done for design, architecture, and engineering. There are (were, at least) specialized, integrated revision control products out there by Adobe and AutoDesk. I don't think I've encountered them in the wild, but I haven't looked too hard. I don't think it's lack of product. I pretty convinced that there just isn't any significant level of adoption. Revision control is just an intrinsically difficult thing for people to grasp. I'm sure more than a few folks here have walked into software shops that were either abusing or simply not using any revision control. Look at the state of the art for a product made by programmer for programmers: https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/howto/revert-a-faulty-merge.txt https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/howto/rever.... I was trying to explain this process last week. It's just not easy.
- rdw 13y agoHow would you compare this to LiveLoop?(http://www.getliveloop.com/ http://www.getliveloop.com/) It looks like a very similar approach, is it just sans the real-time aspect? (I know the LiveLoop folks, so this caught my eye.)
- zefi 13y agoBig fans of the liveloop guys, great to see other people tackling the problem. For us we're trying to make UX our key differentiator, and keep things as simple as possible. Also, we're doing slide by slide version control, rather than the snapshots of the whole file, which a few other companies in the space go for. One other interesting thing to note, is that when we were doing usability testing, people seemed to prefer the idea of new drafts of a slide rather than pure realtime. It seemed to suit the way they currently worked rather than, realtime. This surprised us.
- rdw 13y agoInteresting, that surprises me as well. Thanks for sharing!
- jpatokal 13y agoInstalling a plugin and pressing "Sync" may indeed be improvement over manually merging Word docs, although they do gloss over the hairy yet important bit of managing permissions: who exactly gets access to each doc? But having gotten used to Google Docs, it's considerably more convenient -- hell, nearly magical -- to be able to just work and have your changes sync in real-time. For example, meeting minutes pretty much write themselves when everybody has the ability to edit the doc simultaneously and summarize what they've just said.
- zefi 13y agoIf someone has the document then they can get the changes. We know this isn't the perfect way to do, but it's the simplest way to start off with. Would appreciate any thoughts on how we can make this better. I'm on zefi@
- qq66 13y agoShameless plug for LiveLoop -- that's what we do. Keystroke by keystroke like Google Docs. Check us out: http://getliveloop.com http://getliveloop.com . We support PowerPoint 2007 and 2010 right now.
- qq66 13y agoThe scale of this problem is hard to overestimate. I estimate that people collectively spend 100 billion hours in PowerPoint annually. We're tackling the same problem at LiveLoop (http://getliveloop.com http://getliveloop.com)... but we capture edits keystroke by keystroke so you don't have to click "sync" to see each others edits. Somewhat like Etherpad inside PowerPoint. The other big problem we've identified is participating in PowerPoint from tablets... So we have a mobile client that also lets you see presentations in keystroke-by-keystroke realtime.
- arikrak 13y ago>Function: Work out what has changed >Dev Method: git diff >Normal Method: Open two documents at the same time, look through to work out what the differences are. I don't think non-programmers are all manually comparing documents. In Microsoft Word, people can use any of the following methods: - "Track Changes" when they edit - use Word's compare documents feature - view Previous Versions on Word Wep App - Use Sharepoint (if they're in a large company). I agree that version control is still an issue, but it's not like nothing exists yet. I think Microsoft or Google will probably be able to improve their version-control/collaboration tools though, so it might be hard for a third-party to beat them.