Collaboration Curmudgeons Rejoice: Revizr Takes Old-School Editing Online

Written by Steven Walling / June 8, 2009 4:00 PM / 3 Comments

Revizr positions itself as online document collaboration that embodies everything the wiki is not. Its functionality begins and ends with ownership and privacy in mind. Organizations who've been steeped in the emerging values of an open enterprise should steer clear of this solution.

But if you find yourself pining for a digital reincarnation of the writing process of yesteryear, when your editor's red ink touched your copy only after you were darn good and ready for it, then Revizr is the digital incarnation of all your hopes and dreams.

Whatever your feelings about ownership and document collaboration, Revizr is really only suitable if you're looking to write finished products, rather than perpetually on-going collaborative works. The truth is, Revizr is more of an online co-editing tool than anything resembling the kind of document collaboration most people are familiar with from the new breed of enterprise software solutions.

Instead of using access controls and versioning to allow filtering after publication among coworkers or the public, Revizr works on the filter-then-publish model.

Through either importing or writing directly in a text box, you can input the documents you're working with and where they can be marked up and commented on by those you choose to share them with. Direct hands-on editing is basically impossible by design, since all changes you make are made in red markup and must be approved by a document owner.

Aggressively retrograde software can be strangely appealing sometimes. Revizr certainly knows it's based on a traditional model, but it's innovative in the sense that it has taken an old methodology and created a SaaS platform around it. And it works, in it's own special "get off my lawn" way.

Comments

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Props on working in #getoffmylawn. Still, it's not completely fair to characterize Revizr as backwards-looking. It's more like using a way to work together that people are already familiar with.

Revizr is more like a wiki plus. You can let anyone change the content of your document if you like, but really, how often is that what you want? Usually you just want advice on how to improve things without letting people to change what you wrote.

Posted by: Ryan Koopmans | June 8, 2009 4:17 PM

Revizr falls under my category of "collaborative document revisioning."

Basically, these things look to replace Word's "Tools:Compare and Merge Documents" feature.

I have a couple other candidates in this category:

DocVerse looks pretty amazing since it's an actual Office add-in that brings Office online to collaborate. But, it's currently only PowerPoint.
http://www.docverse.com/

The other one is Textflow. It's quite similar to Revizr, but adds a neat feature if you get the Adobe AIR version - drag and drop multiple versions of a Word Document onto Textflow to compare the changes. http://www.textflow.com/

Of course, lets see how Google Wave effects this area.

Posted by: Brian LaLonde | June 9, 2009 11:13 AM