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 “Source Collection”, 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 - they’ve 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 don’t think that’s 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 but the ability to send an unpublished book to another member of the team for them to make changes.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 book’s drop-down menu in the Collections view that would zip the book’s 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.
I’m 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 haven’t 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:
“Paul Frank currently has this book locked, so you cannot open it.”
“This collection has been marked as one that is shared, but you currently don’t have an internet collection, so you cannot edit any of the books in it.”
“It appears that this book was in the process of being uploaded to Dropbox when a connection was lost” (I’ve 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 ‘shared’ 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
I’ve placed Bloom collections that I want to share with co-workers into a Google Drive folder that is synced to my local computer with Google’s File Stream and also synced to their computers (they use Google’s 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 aren’t using the collection at the same time.
Thank you Bruce,
We will try Google Drive with File Stream or Google’s Backup and Sync
Scott
I can’t think of any reason that Dropbox would be different… Scott were you able to edit a text file in a text editor? If not, I suppose the sharing just wasn’t 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 “lock file” in the folder of that book, and doesn’t 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 this… even with a “lock file” (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. We’ll experiment further with dropbox. I’ve 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 ‘accidents’ are bound to happen.
I like the idea of a lock file. If I’m understanding it correctly, that would let us safely work with a Bloom collection on a network share, too.
I’m just starting to try out Bloom and have a situation where the mother-tongue speaker I’m working with has translated a COVID-19 book. Now I need to check it. I was wondering if there was a thing like the Publish to the Web so that I could get it but it looks like there isn’t. That would be really helpful. We were trying to figure this out last night before she took off for the village this morning but she’s gone now. I’ll have to wait for her to come back to town and try the suggestions here. But a send/receive like Paratext or OneStory Editor would be really helpful. Or a way to send the book somewhere like the Publish to the Web tab so that I could get it from the web.
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The person who created the book could “Publish” as a Simple PDF, then send that PDF to you.
But I wouldn’t be able to edit it in Bloom. I could edit the PDF though since of have Adobe, send the edited PDF to her, then she edit in Bloom. Though I’d want to see what was in Bloom before giving the go ahead to publish or whatever.
By “like Publish to the Web”, do you mean you would like the ability to publish somewhere on the Web which isn’t bloomlibrary.org? You’re correct that we don’t have that feature. You could simply publish to bloomlibrary.org temporarily and then remove the book if that is helpful to you.
Otherwise, if you’re comfortable working with the file system on your computer, there are other options to copy the book from her computer to yours. Let me know if you would find this information helpful.
@robolton Yes, I also wish there was a send/receive function in Bloom so more than one person could work on or even observe work on a book or collection. This would be helpful in a number of situations I have found myself in.
Today I was playing with an idea that wouldn’t be expensive for us to implement (say, a week instead of… 6 months for Send/Receive). I would be interested in what y’all think of it.
Step 1) When uploading a book to blorg (bloomlibrary.org), there would be an option to upload it as a “Private Draft”. You would be able to see it, but no one else would, unless you shared the URL with them. There would be a control on the blorg page to change the status to “Published”.
With the above, it would become easy to show your book to someone for feedback before publishing it.
Step 2) Next, if the person with whom you shared that URL then downloads the book into Bloom, Bloom would know that this is a collaboration. It would know not to make a derivative, just open the book for editing. Then when they go to upload their edited version to blorg, it would actually give them the option of overwriting the original, again as a “Private Draft”.
OK, there are lots of variations on the above we could consider, but I want to start simple for discussions sake.
Would this get used much? Would it solve much of the problem?
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YES PLEASE!
We need this in Cameroon as well.
- @paul_frank, A true .zip isn’t always an option. Windows’ Zip can’t handle special characters, and the folder name follows the book title, and so I’ve had to fallback to tools like 7zip that the user doesn’t have on their machine.
- Dropbox or Google Drive Sync require installing and configuration, and there are the possible sync issues that have been mentioned.
I’ve proposed to John that Bloom natively makes the files shareable (export/import) using the internal 7zip compression, but it sounds like that request is very far down the line. Send/Receive would be very helpful (and allow merging!). A third option would be a private “waiting area” that John proposed where users could publish password-protected unfinished books to BloomLibrary for review.
files shareable (export/import)
We could do that. Hopefully I’m underestimating the usefulness of that over current methods.