Question from a user in South Asia:
I have a question regarding Bloom. Is there a way to share editable formats of books in progress between different users, within the same language project? What about across languages within a cluster project?
This is a need we have in our project, as books need to be edited by different people remotely and sometimes we adapt a particular story for all languages in the project. At the moment we are using Publisher.
I wonder if Dropbox would work for them?
Liz, Iām not sure what you mean about sharing āformatsā. If two people are working on the same book, basically you just have to make sure only one of them works on it at a time, and transfer the book folder using something like dropbox in between.
If youāre thinking about designing page layouts (picture placement, text formatting etc) that can be reused in different books, take a look at the new Template Starter template added in Bloom 3.9
I suspect that what they want is akin to the Send/Receive function (which I believe may have dropped off the future feature list) that makes it so that one person can send it and another receive to continue working on it, then send it back. Our Enabling Writers grantee in Nigeria apparently ran into this problem, with wanting editors to actually work on the books in Bloom on different computers than the authors. So they needed to get the Bloom books onto another computer without ending up with two versions of the book being worked on separately.
The only way I am aware of to do this right now would be for one person to zip a bookās folder and send it to the second person who unzips it into a collection on their computer for the same language. They just have to agree who is currently in control of the book and can make changes. Bloom doesnāt have any built-in tools for sharing individual books in editable (not shell book) form as far as I know.
With regard to adapting a book for all languages in the project, I believe they would do that by creating a Bloom Pack with the book in it that could be installed on other computers and used in collections for the other languages in the project. So, Bloom does have tools for that kind of sharing of books across languages.
Oh, with regard to Dropbox, we have indeed used Dropbox to share a single collection of books between different people. We have found that it works best to zip the collection folder and put it in a Dropbox folder for the other person to unzip and work on. This can work well but requires a fair amount of attention to version control and who should be working on the books at a given point in time.
Some sort of āsend this book to someone elseā could be a useful feature.
I just copied the question as I received it, but I suspect the first sentence is about the ability to have one person edit it, then send it to another person in a format that allows them to also edit it. (E.g. not as a PDF, Ebook, or in Bloom Library).
Thanks for the suggestions.
There seems to be two things they want to do:
Do they want to edit a Bloom book outside of the Bloom program? This doesnāt sound like a great idea to me, especially since Bloom is freely available. To send a book to someone else for editing in Bloom, zipping the project folder for a thumb drive or Dropbox works. We have been doing this, labeling each zip file with a date for version backups. The editors must be very careful to assign editing rights to one person at a time and make sure that person receives the latest files.
They are still new to using Bloom and have been using Publisher for their books until now. So if they can do this in Bloom instead, they would welcome that. (But sharing books between users is their main need).
How are they doing this in Publisher?
Even with Send/Receive two people can not work on the same book at the same time. It might be faster to email a pub file back and forth but it still has to be done with care. I would say that the benefits of using Bloom over Publisher should be weighed against the inconvenience of using a Dropbox-like solution. Depends on their internet quality, I imagine.
On the other hand, I just tested emailing a .BloomPack file between sil.org addresses. It looks as though you can only BloomPack a āSource Collectionā, not an individual book from within a collection. Might it be worth (mis)using the Bloom Source Collection feature for books that need to be emailed back and forth?
@kblewett - theyāve been emailing/sharing the Publisher file with those who need to make changes.
I realise that even with send/receive two people cannot work on the same book at the same time. I donāt think thatās what they are wanting (although it may be a good feature!) but the ability to send an unpublished book to another member of the team for them to make changes.
I would like to pick up this thread, as just this past week I was asked by two separate projects how to collaborate on books, particularly one person writing them another person editing on another computer.
One suggestion I have is to create a function to put on a bookās drop-down menu in the Collections view that would zip the bookās folder so that the zip could be sent to someone else. Presumably, Bloom would give the file a special extension so that Bloom on the other end would know what to do with it. The simplest version of this might be to place the zip of the book in the collection folder on the second computer and double-click on it. Bloom would unzip the book to that collection. The person could then edit it and repeat the process when they want to send it back.
A more refined version could hide a book or make it uneditable after sending it to prevent the person from editing it while someone else is working on it. Then undo that when the book is added again.
Iām wondering about leaning on existing sharing services like Dropbox and Google Drive. These already seem to do something about locking when using MS Office, but so far I havenāt seen a way for other apps to get the same benefits. But we could probably add a file to indicate locking status, which Bloom would understand.
One way to think about the requirements is to think of all the problem situations and what Bloom might do/say/offer in them:
āPaul Frank currently has this book locked, so you cannot open it.ā
āThis collection has been marked as one that is shared, but you currently donāt have an internet collection, so you cannot edit any of the books in it.ā
āIt appears that this book was in the process of being uploaded to Dropbox when a connection was lostā (Iāve seen this happen countless times)
I have a request for a project for just this thing. The ability for multiple people to work on the same collection. We tried using dropbox but that only partially worked.
Dropbox worked provided the users were all using the same Dropbox account.
If you āsharedā your files with another DropBox account then the recipient received a static copy of the project. The changes they made would not be sent to the owner of the doc or other team members.
Have you, or anyone, found a solution that would work?
Thanks
Iāve placed Bloom collections that I want to share with co-workers into a Google Drive folder that is synced to my local computer with Googleās File Stream and also synced to their computers (they use Googleās Backup & Sync since they have personal gmail accounts). This has worked fine for us to have access to the same collection on different computers, as long as we keep coordinated and make sure that two people arenāt using the collection at the same time.
Thank you Bruce,
We will try Google Drive with File Stream or Googleās Backup and Sync
Scott
I canāt think of any reason that Dropbox would be differentā¦ Scott were you able to edit a text file in a text editor? If not, I suppose the sharing just wasnāt done correctly with Dropbox.
In any case, with all these sharing methods, if two people are both editing a book at the same time, there is going to me much gnashing of teeth. Conceivably we could do something in Bloom where, when you open a book in the Edit tab, it first checks for a ālock fileā in the folder of that book, and doesnāt let you open it if that is found. If it is not found, it creates that file, and then when you leave the Edit tab, it removes that file.
This might still not be 100% safe, but perhaps 99%. What do you think?
Just thinking some more on thisā¦ even with a ālock fileā (or with Bloom talking directly to Dropbox through its new API that allows for locking), this all falls apart if team members ever use Bloom without being online. Is that a concern?
Thanks John. Weāll experiment further with dropbox. Iāve asked my colleague to share the project with my dropbox account. Having a lock file component would be nice. I think the team will try to handle the conflict problem through communication, but āaccidentsā are bound to happen.
I like the idea of a lock file. If Iām understanding it correctly, that would let us safely work with a Bloom collection on a network share, too.