For a good while now, with Plutext you’ve been able to be in a Word document at the same time as your co-workers – provided all you were doing was working on tables and paragraphs (editing them, inserting, deleting or moving them around).

With this latest release, you can add images and Word comments, and have them replicate properly between Word 2007 users.

Here is a screencast of this in action:

If you want to play with this yourself, you can download our Word Add-In and give it a shot!

For username & password, please see here. The password is “tester”.

For detailed instructions, see this PDF, or this earlier screencast.

If you’d like to chat about your own Plutext installation, please contact us using this form.

Here is a short screencast of the gist of it:

If you are working on legal documents, government reports, or other formal deliverables you’ll probably want to make the process more structured.  Here is an excerpt from an old screencast showing our features for lawyers and others requiring accountability:

If you want to give it a try, the easiest way to try it out is to download our Word 2007 add-in, then fire up Word and login to the “public0902″ group with these “tester” settings (on Word’s review ribbon, click our “File” button, then Settings), using password “tester”:

Click to enlarge

then open an existing document (from the Plutext “File” button on the Review ribbon).

You can get a colleague to work with you on a document. Or you can simulate collaboration simply by opening the document twice on your PC (which is what I’ve done in the screencasts above).

Right now, you need Word 2007.  Next week, we’ll release an updated build of our cross-platform client which you can try.

This video shows you how to add your own document to the public space (or your private space):

But be careful, anyone else can see the documents if you just use the “public” group.

If you’d like a little privacy, you can setup a space of your own on our test server.

We’d love to know what you think, either in the comments, or our forums, or privately (jason@plutext.org).

Please report problems with the Word add-in here, and server problems here.  Thanks.

Naturally, there are a few limitations in this alpha, including:

• the Audit function doesn’t like bookmarks
• adding an image won’t work

Finally, if you want to uninstall the Word add-in, you can do this from Window’s add/remove programs in the usual way.

At the moment, it is still too hard to try out plutext:

• You have to build your own plutext-server, because there is no web-based user self registration for our test server.  This will change in the next fortnight.
• Building your own plutext-server isn’t too hard if you are a Java developer, but we’ll make that easier as well.  We’re building a VMware appliance which you’ll be able to download, which contains a preconfigured development environment.  Unless you are really keen, you may as well wait for that.
• Currently, you have to build a Word 2007 add-in to interact with the plutext server.  Soon this will be a downloadable executable.

So that’s the agenda for the next couple of weeks.  Cheers!

• the instructions for setting up your Visual Studio 2005 environment, which I linked to in the previous post
• new end user instructions for using the client (including screenshots).

This is the add-in for Word 2007 which lets you collaborate with other people on a docx document.  I’ll post some screenshots to the website tomorrow.
At the moment, you need a plutext-server (BYO or use our development server).  It also helps to have some collaborators, though you can open the document twice in Word and collaborate with yourself.  All collaborators currently have to be using Word 2007 with the add-in – a Word 2003 add-in is currently under development.