Plutext, Document Collaboration, Collaboration Tools

The good thing about technology these days is that you are allowed do different things using different software and that these different software can be used to improve another software’s efficacy. This is what Plutext is all about.

Basically, Plutext is a Word add-in which you install together with your Microsoft Word in order for the program to have higher efficacy when it comes to document collaboration. It supports replication between users when it comes to images and comments about the documents. With Plutext, you can easily work in a Word document while you and your workmates are busy editing, inserting and deleting texts in a single document. For now, it can only support Windows 2007 and its higher version.

What Plutext does is that it makes the Microsoft Word a multi-user environment thereby allowing a number of people in a particular team to work on a document at the same time while the other users can see the changes once the document is ready.

Since Plutext is very versatile, it allows the user to synchronize with the documents in other document collaboration tools like Alfresco thus the users need not do any reconciliation and transformation of the changes incorporated from these documents.

The changes in the documents are saves in the program and are replicated for other people to see who will open the document. With Plutext, the users can easily keep track of the changes thanks to the track changes usually found on Microsoft Word. Moreover, you can also see who changed what since you can see in the repository of the program itself.

However, the problem initially with PLutext is that it can only support Microsoft Word documents which is rather cumbersome for other would-be users who are using Ubuntu, Linux, Unix or Mac Operating Systems. Moreover, lower versions of Windows OS like the Windows 2003 are not supported. For this reason, the creators of Plutext created another version of the program that can easily supported by lower versions of Windows as well as Mac OS X. Unfortunately, the software is still not compatible to Ubuntu, Linux are Unix.
Plutext is indeed promising and that it can make you and your team easily meet deadlines. However, for now, it would have been great if this particular software can be supported by other OS to provide a lot of convenience to a lot of users running on different OS.