I see what you did there.

August 18, 2010 9:30 AM

Is there any kind of OSS/otherwise affordable collaborative-editing software akin to Google Docs that one can host on their own system?

So Google Docs is *awesome* as a web-based word processor, and it's fantastic for collaborative editing amongst a group of remote people.

But honestly, some stuff needs to remain on our hardware, in an environment we control.

Is there anything out there that will provide similar functionality with a web-based editorial environment that we can host ourselves? This would be for a small startup firm, so MS's SharePoint products are well beyond our means.

posted by swngnmonk to Technology (5 answers total)

Also, have a look at what Zoho APIs offer.

My team is looking at HyghLighter (to move away from a big project hosted by Wikispaces; we are not too worried about ability to self-host, rather to improve collaboration). I was not totally convinced with its functionality, but there do not seem to be many alternatives around.
posted by Jurate at 9:42 AM on August 18, 2010

etherpad works pretty well for this.
posted by alikins at 9:47 AM on August 18, 2010

The source code for Etherpad is actually available, now. If you feel up to it, and you aren't afraid of installing a couple of oddball languages onto your server, you can have your own private version of EtherPad.
posted by verb at 10:03 AM on August 18, 2010

I have not used it beyond the demo, but FengOffice is an open-source, installable collaboration suite with online document editing. There is a monthly license fee based on number of users, and they have a free, unsupported "community" edition as well.
posted by camcgee at 1:03 PM on August 18, 2010

Response by poster: thank you everyone, this is a bunch to go on!
posted by swngnmonk at 8:20 PM on August 18, 2010