however the primary concern that I always have with any sort of version control programs is the fact that the documents must be completely internal and within our firewall, any sort of external hosting is usually not secure enough, and most solutions seem to lack easy implementation due to the speed of technology at large banks.
There are two things you'd merge: changes to the whole presentation (i.e. new slides), and multiple changes to the same slide. In the first instance, we slot together the slides and alert the user. In the latter instance (if you sync a change and I sync a change to a single slide), they will both appear chronologically in the list. It is up to the user to merge these versions together.
Automatic merging works well with code because you can move locations of functions and -- to some extent -- chunks of code (although git usually will require some merge resolution); as we are merging something (a slide) which, unlike code, has to appear a certain way visually, this approach doesn't make much sense. Auto-merging together two slides with different content would not have a desirable result. I'd love to hear your ideas on what you think the best UX for this is.
version a
/ \
/ \
add slide change style
\ /
\ /
version b
Of course a style change could include things like font size changes that could break the layout of the new slide...
Say Person A and Person B are working on a slide that has the text "Hello World" centered on a white background.
Person A makes a change to the slide by changing the background to red and moving the text box up 10 pixels.
Person B makes a change to the slide by changing the text to "Hello World!"
They both sync at the same time.
Ideally, Kivo would be able to differentiate the changes as non-conflicting. For some reason I doubt Microsoft's Powerpoint API allows you to differentiate between those changes, however. :)
If your company is of any decent size you have a server of your own, so what's the advantage of putting the repository on Kivo?
Microsoft is always going to have an edge over anyone when it comes to Microsoft Office documents, so even if some of this idea becomes successful, I don't see how it stays out of office for long.
I think a closer model to GitHub and the Windows app would be more useful to me. The Github Windows app is able to pick up differences in Word documents without any trouble already (although probably just text changes).
When working on a project, we normally have multiple files in a directory. A PowerPoint or two, a couple of Word docs and maybe an Excel file. A standalone app, rather than a PowerPoint plugin, would be able to look for all changes in the directory such as the addition of image files.
More importantly I would like to see pull requests. I like to share my resources with other educators, that aren't part of my 'team'. It would be nice if they could make improvements to my resources and then submit a pull request, so I could review what they've done and then accept it.
Just my thoughts. I've long thought we need a GitHub for teachers, but I don't have the skills to implement this yet.
We're working without YC's help anyway and hoping to launch soon :)
-is there a project owner, the one that accepts commits (I suppose there is one)
-I really like sigma´s idea. Be able to split between visual updates and content updates (but not a priority)
-how do you express-print the diff function on a slide? have you considered about a toogle button, or a slider to change between different versions of the different branches?.
-Is the document´s owner able to merge a single slide from a branch(user) that he likes, and then at the next slide choose from another branch(user)?
-How do you manage annotations?
I´ll defenitely check it when I´ll get home, there is a big oportunity here. Personally we have tried with google docs, office 365, and the like, they just don´t work. On a side note if you happen to need distribution for SaaS on a IT basis and want to be able to control how people uses your product (and charge accordingly), just contact us at apparly.com .
I think it's an idea with a lot of potential, if executed correctly. Great to see they're YC S13!
I'll try and find a link later today.