Ask HN: Inhouse collaborative app

2 pointsspog2 comments

My team of 10 have a need to make daily updates to the same spreadsheet. Ideal way of doing this would be to use Google Spreadsheets where multiple users can make changes to the same spreadsheet...but our company doesn't allow us to put data on Google Docs. Is there any alternative software that I can use for my team by hosting it within the company firewall? Thank you very much in advance.

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For a spreadsheet in particular, I'm not 100% sure what's out there for doing this (other than the obvious solution of just putting the file on shared drive and emailing or yelling over the cube walls to arrange access). But, in a more general sense, there's a bunch of "stuff" out there that deals with collaborative editing of documents... here are some pointers that might be useful:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wave

http://etherpad.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_real-time_editor

You might also consider a wiki... I think there are some wikis that will let you use tables, and then export the resulting data in Excel format. XWiki might have that, can't remember offhand.

Thank you very much. I'll try them.

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