81–90 of 118 posts
Finally someone is doing this! I've been toying with the idea myself but haven't been able to dedicate time to it, mostly I was deterred by the MS Word format mess. I'm sure it wasn't fun making this work with a 21st century versioning system. I'm sure lots of people will happily throw money at you for this!
What's wrong with using a document management system instead of this?
If you had a version that companies could install on a private internal network, you could easily charge between $100 and $1000 a month for this. I work in legal and compliance technology, and it is very important to keep documents secured internally if the have confidential information.
Many others have said it already, but I'll say it again: 1. You have a fantastic product 2. Many potential users won't accept to have their documents stored "in the cloud" (even though those same users share those same documents by email with zero security, all the time) 3. Offer a stand alone version and sell a licence (or a rent, think the former Google Search Appliance) 4. Charge an arm and a leg for it -- think O…
Agreed on all points. This has law firms written all over it.
Firstly, great job in getting that mess to play well with Git! The main limitation with Git is that it only works with plain text (think Windows Notepad). I have seen authors resort to plain text or markdown in order to take advantage of Git, but this means losing all of your rich formatting such as images and fonts. This is usually too much of a sacrifice for companies as formatting needs to be reapplied with each p…
I'll answer some of these questions for the developer, because I'm smack in the middle of their target market: litigation attorney. Anything other than Word is a non-starter for 99% of law firms (and the other 1% is still on WordPerfect). Markdown is awesome and I use it for my notes files and all kinds of things but contracts, settlement docs, pleadings, motions, etc etc all exist strictly and only in Word. And prob…
But the VC tends to be centralised, rather than distributed. I've often hankered after a more git-like experience when working remotely or offline, and I will follow this project with interest.
One area that is underserved at the moment is diffing .ppt files. Since a lot of the tax industry in particular uses PowerPoint for step plans and structure papers (because it is generally easier to build structure charts). Whilst it isn't the right tool for the job, for as long as people continue to use it, getting this working on your app would be huge.
Firstly, great job in getting that mess to play well with Git! The main limitation with Git is that it only works with plain text (think Windows Notepad). I have seen authors resort to plain text or markdown in order to take advantage of Git, but this means losing all of your rich formatting such as images and fonts. This is usually too much of a sacrifice for companies as formatting needs to be reapplied with each p…
Completely disagree. There's a bunch of "word-like markdown editors" out there. We don't need one more of those. There's a real market here. Word is huge, and people aren't gonna give it up. This looks to be a good technical solution. Trying to move people from word to markdown is an ok ideal, but not a practical business move. My advice to the creator, ignore bArray's advice.
I'm coming at this exact problem from the opposite direction, making a Markdown-based static-publishing CMS intended for corporate use (aimed at official documentation, standard operating procedures, handbooks, etc) and weening people who are used to it away from Word is the most difficult part of the entire process.
On the other hand, Word falls short when it comes to a large number of related documents, with inconsistent styling, flakey 'hyperlinks', ridiculous attachments and lack of good version control (something Simul appears to be tackling).
There's plenty of room for innovation in this area and props to the OP for actually tackling the harder challenge head on. My fear in trying to sell this to businesses would be that letting their confidential docs leave their network is going to be a hurdle. A self-hosted version would definitely be onto a winner, and anything that's not Sharepoint is a good thing.
This is interesting, but what's wrong with "Track Changes"? (a feature Word had for at least 10+ years now). I believe for most people that is more than enough for version control purposes. For tech people that actually know what Git is and how to use it, I bet they'd want real Git integration, or they'd choose to store the document in a different (more easily managed by Git) format such as .md or .html.
[1] It has to be a word document for integration with tooling that does stuff like generating tables of authorities and whatnot.
I can't imagine lawyers will be queuing up to host their sensitive legal documents on someone else's server.