Can anyone recommend a decent file-sharing application/service with version tracking capability? We are trying to setup a paper-writing system for a non-geeky group of users. Therefore the main requirements are ability to work offline, have minimal interference with the existing workflow (word + endnote + illustrator), and ability to share data types beyond documents, presentations & spreadsheets. Given those limitations Subversion seems to win over wikis, Git and Google Docs.. Your opinions/experiences very much appreciated! - Yaroslav Nikolaev

mercurial is quite nice. - Amund Tveit

I haven't tried it, but there is this off-shoot from OpenOffice: http://www.o3spaces.com/. It'll even play with Word, apparently. - Bob O'Hara

Thanks Bob! somehow this one has escaped my attention. But it seems a bit pricey (59€ per user) and has less transparent integration when compared to Subversion..Have inquired their sales about prices for academic institutions... + look for same discussion in The Life Scientists group. ;) - Yaroslav Nikolaev

Using subversion with non-plain text files, e.g. word files, is a bit of a pain because it treats them as binaries and so you won't be able to get a lot of information about what revisions have been made. It would work better with latex. To be honest, I don't think there is an ideal solution to this yet. Personally, I would go with wikis for simplicity. It could be possible to setup offline editing using http://wiki.anotherwebcom.com/Categor... - Matt Leifer

I should also mention that I have started using Elgg to manage my online collaborative writing projects. I've built some custom plugins to enable latex editing. You can see an example here: http://www.quantumcollaborations.org/pg... It does have automatic revision control, but the software is rather limited at the moment. It is more useful for handling multiple collaborations with different groups than for managing a single project. - Matt Leifer

…y'all have seen the sister-thread at http://friendfeed.com/e..., right? - dK

I use git. It's nice to have a distributed system (instead of CVS/SVN) so that I can still commit to it when I'm offline -- I don't understand how SVN fits your offline requirement, or which requirement git fails to meet. I find it very useful to have a full-fledged version-control system instead of using a program's internal one. That way, I can commit related things such as full-size figures, scripts to generate data/plots, etc and have meaningful commit messages for each changeset. - Donnie Berkholz

Matt, thanks! Unfortunately AWC is only an offline wiki editor, while in our case for research paper writing we need a more "coupled" multi-user environment...Will probably have to wait for something more advanced to be developed on the wiki side. - Yaroslav Nikolaev

@Donnie: Git sounds very promising in terms of performance & safety (distributed system). The main issue - poor support for Windows clients, if i'm not mistaken there is no official installer so far, and one still has to build it over cygwin? - Yaroslav Nikolaev

As pointed by dekay - there is a sister thread on the topic here: http://friendfeed.com/e... - Yaroslav Nikolaev