What app/platform to share/edit document?
Hi all, What app or platform do you or your company use to share/edit document for a group of people? Main use would be to put all internal documentation, comment, discovery, and faq into one location. * People say "SharePoint", but never used it myself. * We (old job) use to put Word documents on server. Only one person could write to it at a time, but that was okay for the low traffic. * Plain HTML file might be okay. Edit by Notepad++.
We use a combination of SharePoint and Confluence internally, both are commercial offerings. SharePoint is nice if you have a large Excel sheet for example and have multiple people editing it at the same time. Confluence is just a commercial Wiki software, it has a million plugins that can interact with other software systems, like Jira for instance. This is for thousands of users editing hundreds of thousands of documents, I’m not sure what your scale is. You can always go with MediaWiki, the millions of documents and users using it just at Wikipedia is testimony enough. -nick On Sun, Mar 30, 2025 at 17:17 William Park via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
Hi all,
What app or platform do you or your company use to share/edit document for a group of people? Main use would be to put all internal documentation, comment, discovery, and faq into one location.
- People say "SharePoint", but never used it myself. - We (old job) use to put Word documents on server. Only one person could write to it at a time, but that was okay for the low traffic. - Plain HTML file might be okay. Edit by Notepad++.
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William Park via talk wrote on 2025-03-30 14:17:
What app or platform do you or your company use to share/edit document for a group of people? Main use would be to put all internal documentation, comment, discovery, and faq into one location.
Sounds like a good application of Nextcloud. NC supports 2 "live" collaborative office suites: OnlyOffice and one based on Collabora (I think it's just Nextcloud Office?). The latter one is the default these days, I believe. Both work fine for my purposes, but OnlyOffice works with MS file formats by default. Of course, sharing options are plentiful with NC too. I find the synchronized contacts and calendar functionality crucial to keep my Thunderbird, Android, etc. happy.
William Park via talk said on Sun, 30 Mar 2025 17:17:17 -0400
Hi all,
What app or platform do you or your company use to share/edit document for a group of people? Main use would be to put all internal documentation, comment, discovery, and faq into one location.
* People say "SharePoint", but never used it myself. * We (old job) use to put Word documents on server. Only one person could write to it at a time, but that was okay for the low traffic. * Plain HTML file might be okay. Edit by Notepad++.
Concerning plain HTML via Notepad++: I know nothing about Notepad++, but in my opinion HTML docs are garbage unless they're true, validated HTML that will pretty much render identically across all competent browsers. Otherwise, each browser picks its own way to interpret your broken HTML, usually resulting in things like item A overwriting item B, or microscopic fonts or other stuff that hurts readability and even changes the information conveyed. I've written extensively about validation at https://troubleshooters.com/web/validating.htm , including installing your own copy of the w3c validator locally, because the last thing you want to do is send your proprietary docs to "the cloud" to be validated. As a practical matter, teaching correct HTML5 and validation to every employee creating documentation will cause them to come after you with pitchforks, so much as I love HTML and CSS I'd recommend against HTML for this particular situation. As a side matter, if you're interested in making quality HTML with zero errors and few or no warnings on validation, check out the entirety of Web Workmanship at https://troubleshooters.com/web/ SteveT Steve Litt http://444domains.com
On Mon, 31 Mar 2025 08:48:19 -0400 Steve Litt via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
William Park via talk said on Sun, 30 Mar 2025 17:17:17 -0400 Concerning plain HTML via Notepad++: I know nothing about Notepad++, but in my opinion HTML docs are garbage unless they're true, validated HTML that will pretty much render identically across all competent browsers. Otherwise, each browser picks its own way to interpret your broken HTML, usually resulting in things like item A overwriting item B, or microscopic fonts or other stuff that hurts readability and even changes the information conveyed.
I have used plain HTML to set up on-line notes at several sites. I regard HTML code is idiot simple, and easier to learn than most GUI HTML editors. I used plain Notepad on various Windows machines. It is a nice, simple text editor. Notepad++'s indenting and syntax highlighting is most appreciated. I use vi here at home, and sometimes, emacs. If the HTML is on a local server and probably being read as a file, as opposed to a subnet URL, who cares about validation? The code is pretty idiot resistant. Don't use the marquee tag. I have had no success in training other people to write the HTML. -- Howard Gibson hgibson@eol.ca http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson
If everyone uses the same browser or editor, it should be okay. By the way, what do people use to create/edit HTML files? I just tried * LibreOffice -- it edits HTML, but adds too many tags. * SeaMonkey Composer -- much cleaner HTML. On 2025-03-31 08:48, Steve Litt via talk wrote:
William Park via talk said on Sun, 30 Mar 2025 17:17:17 -0400
Hi all,
What app or platform do you or your company use to share/edit document for a group of people? Main use would be to put all internal documentation, comment, discovery, and faq into one location.
* People say "SharePoint", but never used it myself. * We (old job) use to put Word documents on server. Only one person could write to it at a time, but that was okay for the low traffic. * Plain HTML file might be okay. Edit by Notepad++. Concerning plain HTML via Notepad++: I know nothing about Notepad++, but in my opinion HTML docs are garbage unless they're true, validated HTML that will pretty much render identically across all competent browsers. Otherwise, each browser picks its own way to interpret your broken HTML, usually resulting in things like item A overwriting item B, or microscopic fonts or other stuff that hurts readability and even changes the information conveyed.
I've written extensively about validation athttps://troubleshooters.com/web/validating.htm , including installing your own copy of the w3c validator locally, because the last thing you want to do is send your proprietary docs to "the cloud" to be validated.
As a practical matter, teaching correct HTML5 and validation to every employee creating documentation will cause them to come after you with pitchforks, so much as I love HTML and CSS I'd recommend against HTML for this particular situation.
As a side matter, if you're interested in making quality HTML with zero errors and few or no warnings on validation, check out the entirety of Web Workmanship athttps://troubleshooters.com/web/
SteveT
Steve Litt
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From: William Park via talk <talk@gtalug.org>
What app or platform do you or your company use to share/edit document for a group of people? Main use would be to put all internal documentation, comment, discovery, and faq into one location.
* People say "SharePoint", but never used it myself. * We (old job) use to put Word documents on server. Only one person could write to it at a time, but that was okay for the low traffic. * Plain HTML file might be okay. Edit by Notepad++.
Do you care about privacy, confidentiality, etc.? If not, Google Docs seems like an obvious choice. (I didn't say "best".) In our organization (my household) we use a NAS. That doesn't mediate simultaneous updates. NextCloud would surely be better. Our documents go back a long time so I don't want technical lock-in. In projects I work on collaboratively, git works great. That's not great for WYSIWYG thingees like word processors and spreadsheets. I'm not sure that they are easy to use collaboratively anyway, but Google Docs does it and so does NextCloud, I think. For human authoring, markdown seems better than HTML: simpler, less fussy, less cluttered. That's what Media-wiki and many other systems use. Markdown is easy to fit into a plain-text oriented system like git. If you look at GitHub, you will see that most projects use markdown, especially for their readme.md. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown Unfortunately, there are many minor variations of markdown -- I'm not sure how portable it is. I really like git for managing collaboration since there is an audit trail for all the changes. Media-wiki does this too (look at "View History" on Wikipedia). I assume that LibreOffice and MS Office have tools for this but I don't know how they do or could work. Even though git is useful and markdown is simple, some people will resent having to learn them. (Git is complicated so you need to produce a really simple set of recipes for your users. GUI front-ends might help.) Secure inter-organizational sharing is an issue. I've used WeTransfer.com and CISCO ShareFile (hosted by one of the organizations).
- MS-Word + OneShare has "Share" feature, though my old job didn't used it. I'll look into LibreOffice. - Google Docs is good, but info stay inside company approved platform. So, no Google. - Git/SVN is interesting way to "serialize" the access. Hmm... - I was thinking something like Wiki without the database backend. Thanks. On 2025-03-31 10:42, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
From: William Park via talk<talk@gtalug.org>
What app or platform do you or your company use to share/edit document for a group of people? Main use would be to put all internal documentation, comment, discovery, and faq into one location.
* People say "SharePoint", but never used it myself. * We (old job) use to put Word documents on server. Only one person could write to it at a time, but that was okay for the low traffic. * Plain HTML file might be okay. Edit by Notepad++. Do you care about privacy, confidentiality, etc.?
If not, Google Docs seems like an obvious choice. (I didn't say "best".)
In our organization (my household) we use a NAS. That doesn't mediate simultaneous updates. NextCloud would surely be better. Our documents go back a long time so I don't want technical lock-in.
In projects I work on collaboratively, git works great. That's not great for WYSIWYG thingees like word processors and spreadsheets. I'm not sure that they are easy to use collaboratively anyway, but Google Docs does it and so does NextCloud, I think.
For human authoring, markdown seems better than HTML: simpler, less fussy, less cluttered. That's what Media-wiki and many other systems use. Markdown is easy to fit into a plain-text oriented system like git. If you look at GitHub, you will see that most projects use markdown, especially for their readme.md.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown Unfortunately, there are many minor variations of markdown -- I'm not sure how portable it is.
I really like git for managing collaboration since there is an audit trail for all the changes. Media-wiki does this too (look at "View History" on Wikipedia). I assume that LibreOffice and MS Office have tools for this but I don't know how they do or could work.
Even though git is useful and markdown is simple, some people will resent having to learn them. (Git is complicated so you need to produce a really simple set of recipes for your users. GUI front-ends might help.)
Secure inter-organizational sharing is an issue. I've used WeTransfer.com and CISCO ShareFile (hosted by one of the organizations).
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From: William Park via talk <talk@gtalug.org>
- Git/SVN is interesting way to "serialize" the access. Hmm...
It does more than serialize (a lock would do that). It helps you merge changes that had been done at the same time. I think that git has won over SVN. Probably for good reasons.
- I was thinking something like Wiki without the database backend.
There are a lot of Wiki systems, some of which don't use databases. Here's one (I think this is the software GTALUG used but hasn't maintained since Chris died): <https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki> Here's a list of Wiki software. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wiki_software>
William Park via talk wrote on 2025-03-30 14:17:
What app or platform do you or your company use to share/edit document for a group of people?
Are you talking about concurrent editing? If that's not a feature you're looking for, how do you plan on *preventing* it? A quick search seems to show no concurrent editing feature support for Notepad++, neither is file locking (though it's been requested). My searching might be incomplete though.
Main use would be to put all internal documentation, comment, discovery, and faq into one location.
...
* Plain HTML file might be okay. Edit by Notepad++.
What format is the current documentation in? If any of it is in HTML, it's probably not easily source-editable. And getting others on board ... good luck. If it's in some common office suite format(s), then most everyone will be familiar with the tools to work with it. Which brings us back to Google Docs, MS Office, or Nextcloud - all offer ability to edit common office suite documents, spreadsheets, etc. and can support multiple editors at once. LibreOffice has an interesting take on it: https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/shared/guide/collab.html
In LibreOffice Writer, Impress, and Draw, only one user at a time can open any document for writing. In Calc, many users can open the same spreadsheet for writing at the same time.
I have used a fair number of systems at this point, all of which seem to have pros and cons. For collaborative editing - multiple users editing at once - web-based tools are going to win this. Google Docs is the clear winner for academia, because the alternatives don't have as robust a set of tools for reference management. If you only need document editing, it looks like cryptpad is a promising option not yet discussed. You can stand up an instance inside the walls of your organization, or even run a public-facing instance with less probable exposure because of the encryption built in. Also, your organization's data isn't being used to feed LLMs by Microsoft or Google, which is a nice change. Confluence, already mentioned, is not good at collaborative editing, even though it is a wiki. The only reason anyone has Confluence (I believe) is because they bought Jira. I imagine that this can unify your whole workforce in hating Atlassian, instead of hating management. I have used whatever Microsoft is calling its document sharing platform - SharePoint, Teams, etc - and it is fine. OneNote is actually capable of collaborative editing, which is kind of OK. It all gets sucked into the LLM machine, and Microsoft will never miss a chance to charge you rent on things you thought you owned, but it mostly works. I have used Dokuwiki, mentioned below, and it is surprisingly capable, though I would not try anything too complicated, there is little conflict management built in. While I like Markdown, and using a source code management tool is very robust, I would only try that with other programmers - most people who are not programmers are profoundly insensitive to syntax, and even very competent Excel jockeys don't think of what comes after the "=" to be syntax. For markdown to work well, people have to be able to express themselves by knowing the syntax, and that is a non-starter in my experience. On Sun, 30 Mar 2025 at 17:17, William Park via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
Hi all,
What app or platform do you or your company use to share/edit document for a group of people? Main use would be to put all internal documentation, comment, discovery, and faq into one location.
- People say "SharePoint", but never used it myself. - We (old job) use to put Word documents on server. Only one person could write to it at a time, but that was okay for the low traffic. - Plain HTML file might be okay. Edit by Notepad++.
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participants (7)
-
D. Hugh Redelmeier -
Howard Gibson -
Nick Accad -
Ron -
Steve Litt -
William Park -
William Witteman