Project: SynchroEdit

Sponsor: Alacrity Management Corporation

 Lead: Christopher Allen, blog: Life With Alacrity

 Location: Berkeley CA

Description:

SynchroEdit is an open-source, browser-based simultaneous multiuser editor, a form of same-time, different-place groupware. It allows multiple users to edit a single web-based document at the same time, and it continuously synchronizes all changes so that users always have the same version.

SynchroEdit's main editor is fully WYSIWYG, dynamically displaying bolds, italics, underlines, strikethroughs, with various justifications, indents and listing styles as an author inputs them. SynchroEdit also supports a simple, text-only editor for more basic documents. To clarify the multiuser experience, the editor window clearly depicts every user's changes in a specific color and also marks where each user is currently editing with a colored flag listing the user's name.

SynchoEdit is an open-source project, and there is not a "web 2.0" service business behind it. So it is more comparable to "Movable Type" which is an open source project, vs. "TypePad" which is a service based on Movable Type, or "Six Apart" which is a web 2.0 company offering a number of products and services, including Movable Type and TypePad. There is not yet a SynchroEdit service available yet, and Alacrity Management has yet to spin out a company to commercialize the tool.