Conceptual Clarity

When we first started developing the track changes functionality a year ago we only had an inkling of how useful it was going to be.  Afterall, over the years content applications have found ways around this deficit through various differencing and compare and merge engines and there was definitely a question in my mind as to how our track changes functionality would stack up against these.  Since I've been using track changes in an online editor longer than anyone else out there (all of four months) I thought I would relate my experience thus far for those wondering the same thing.

To put track changes to the test, it was deployed to both our internal wiki and the CMS for the Ephox web site.  This ensured that the functionality received some real world testing.  It took some time for people to start using it on the wiki, but with the Ephox web site the benefits were immediate.  From Australia I was able to work in collaboration with our marketing and sales departments in the USA without several long phone calls or screen sharing sessions.  Everyone could immediately see what had been changed and by whom.  Also, most importantly, changes could be seen in context and worked with immediately in the editor.  This saved hours, days if you include the time delay between the USA and Australia!

More recently I've been doing some planning on our wiki for some new product ideas and initiatives for 2007.  As part of this I've been collecting feedback from people throughout Ephox.  Previously, I would have watched our wiki's RSS feed for changes and read through document comparisons, often re-reading the complete document to see the changes and comments in context.  With track changes, this becomes significantly easier.  I can see who made changes, when and see their comments in color coded text.  Yes, we've had this in Word forever…but in a wiki?  In a wiki I've found track changes really shines!

The other "feature" of track changes that has me particularly excited is the ease of install.  I've incorporated track changes into five systems now, a wiki, a blog, our custom CMS, IBM Workplace Web Content Management and Alfresco Enterprise Content Management.  In each case installation was as easy as flicking a switch.  Once I turned on the configuration options for track changes (about 10 mins work) I was up and running, no more changes and no server-side components required.  Congratulations to our engineers!

The work is not finished yet, already I am finding things that need improvement.  For instance, I really want to be able to right click on the marker in the left margin to accept and reject changes.  Also, I really want comments, right now we are just adding these as if they were part of the document but they need to be separate.  As always I would be eager to hear from you what you would like to see with Track Changes and about your experiences with it in general.

Track changes has saved me hours, maybe even days, of my time by now, if you take that figure and multiply that those savings over a company - well to quote Keanu Reeves "WHOA" - that's some saving!  The feature has enabled me to collaborate much better via our wiki and the content management system on our web site.  Download a copy of EditLive! 6.0 to try it for yourself and within your team.  I think you may well get as much benefit out of track changes as you did from when you first deployed EditLive!.

EditLive!'s Track Changes Markup and Tooltip

This entry was posted on Friday, January 5th, 2007 at 10:39 am
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