I would say that if you go with a version 2 that you make it automatically checked. Then only people who are paying attention closely would hopefully be the ones who would unchecked it if they would have that situation where they would want to.
Could you explain a bit more what the user on the other end would see? You mentioned in an earlier post that the idea would be that a collection could be set up to watch a cloud storage folder and notify the user when a book arrives there so they can choose to add it to their collection. So with option 1 here, would that notification just tell them that a book called “Moon & Cap” (ie just the bold portion of the filename) has been added to their cloud storage folder, and ask if they want to add it to their local collection? Then if Bloom sees that the collection already contains a book called “Moon & Cap”, would it then ask if they want to update it? Or would the “receiving” user see that a book called “Moon & Cap_Name_Date” has been added to the shared folder, so when they add it to their collection they could have multiple books named “Moon & Cap_Name_Date” to decide between?
Could you explain a bit more what the user on the other end would see?
Here’s the state of the idea at the moment:
The hardest part of all this is that, while we are making it easier to collaborate, we don’t want to increase the chances that that two people will both work on the same book at the same time. Our current idea is to automatically create “lock files” in the sharing folder when you start editing a book. When you eventually tell Bloom to share your edits, that file goes away and so the file becomes “unlocked” to the rest of your team.
Note, the above are live embeddings, so these images may change over time as the design is refined:
The “Save to Cloud Storage Folder” dialog is currently out of favor. Instead we would just keep it all in this new “Cloud Sharing” box:
Someone wrote on email to ask about naming. We’d let you set you name/nickname in the settings:
This is really exciting! It looks like a great approach and an intuitive implementation.
Would the collection-level settings (.bloomCollection & customCollectionStyles.css) be shared as well when a user chooses the “Use Cloud Sharing Folder” option for a collection? Asking this because consultants who currently check books that are sent to them in a zip file see a different product when they drop them into a collection on their computer that specifies default fonts, front-matter arrangement, etc. that are different from the author’s collection.
Would the collection-level settings (.bloomCollection & customCollectionStyles.css) be shared as well when a user chooses the “Use Cloud Sharing Folder” option for a collection?
That’s not in scope yet, but I understand the need.
It would help me a lot to hear half a dozen people to tell me a story of how you collaborated on Bloom book.
Who did what?
How many back-and-forths were there where the book moved from machine to machine?
How did you work out who was allowed to be making changes, so that you didn’t end up with two versions of the book?
If you don’t have an actual story, an imagined one would also be helpful.
thanks!
Here’s an alternative approach for your consideration.
We’ve shared books between computers both in the context of collaborating within our local team as well in the context of sharing books with a consultant for publication approval.
Within our local team, any one of the 4 of us who have Bloom installed on our computer may start a book from scratch or from a Shellbook. Others get involved to add images, review orthography, correct usage, add audio recordings, export the book to .bloomd, import it into a RAB project, etc. The back-and-forths with some books can be as low as 8 or 10, but I would say that they are usually in the dozens, maybe more in some cases. We handle this team collaboration by keeping our folder of Bloom collections on a NAS which syncs with a folder on each of our local computers. (The particular system we use is Synology’s Drive Client). So as far as Bloom knows, it is working with a local folder on our computer. We are a small enough team that we can just let each other know which collection we are using so nobody else opens that collection on their computer until the Drive Client indicates that the synchronization is all up to date. A couple times there have been conflicts, but Synology just saves the file it’s unsure of alongside the current file with the filename_computername format for us to evaluate. The lock‑file proposal would help with that.
Sharing with a consultant doesn’t happen until we’ve printed some preliminary versions to test in the community and we feel pretty happy with the “polish” of the book. We tried zipping a single book’s folder to send to the consultant but ran into differences in what they saw because of different collection settings, xMatter versions, etc, so what we did instead was to move all the books we want to have checked into a single collection, and then we zipped that collection for the consultant to unzip into their Bloom folder. There was no further back and forth for that check; they just sent us notes of things to change on our end.
Thanks so much for that Bruce, that’s very helpful. Things to note (using some of the vocabulary I’m playing with for this project):
- Uses a local server and LAN
- A whole collection is the unit of “check out”, if you will
- Uses team communication to coordinate who has the collection “checked out”
- Normally 10-30 back-and-forths per book (<— this is a big eye opener for me)
Pain Points:
- During approval, need a separate, unwieldy system to share with consultant
- Very occasional conflicts when multiple people work on the same file, accidentally
Did I get that right or did I miss something important?
One way of looking at what we should be aiming for would be a system that is almost as convenient as what your team is doing, but which still works if the team is too spread out (or non-technical) to make use of a local NAS.
Yes, that looks like a good summary.
BTW, our number of back-and-forths may be much higher than others because each book for us is a team effort in a developing context. We’re still using a “working” but not officially “established” orthography, so we may need to update spelling/word-break choices more often than others. We’re also producing materials for a few closely related languages, but they are still different enough that negotiating the best way to word things for the most people creates some extra back-and-forth too.
Using the LAN sync has worked pretty well for us locally, but the ability to easily share projects with consultants in a cloud folder will really make publication easier.
In our case, we have tried to avoid a lot of back and forth editing of the book between machines. We have mostly used the work-around of making a PDF and marking that up and sending it back and forth, or marking up a Word document of the text before it is entered into Bloom. We have also used the share screen work-around. We only end up needing to zip and sent the final version back and forth once or twice, using all these work-arounds.
1 Like
In our case, we had a remote user and a local consultant. The title and folder name had non-ascii characters.
The remote user was one of those basic users that Bloom is designed for. The mother-tongue document was all typed in English fields in an English Collection.
Our Consultant wanted to see the work, and she had no way to get it.
The user couldn’t grab one file and send (like Word or publisher), couldn’t zip it, (she didn’t know what 7zip was), and even if she had, our email hates us sending “dangerous” compressed files. (She didn’t have cloud storage set up on her machine.)
I ended up Bomgaring to the user’s machine and transferring the folder to myself, fixing the language codes in the file, copying it to a USB to give to the consultant, letting her look through it, then taking it back on the flash drive before transferring it over Bomgar to the remote user.
I’m mostly in need of an [in-bloom] backup to 7z, and an [in-Bloom] import form 7z.
Hello John and everybody,
I’ve just tried to follow this conversation about different people working on the same booklets, sharing versions etc. Me and my team have paused for various reasons and now, taking up work again, we realize we are in a big mess with many different versions of booklets on 5 different themes in 4 different languages including audio for some (intending audio for all). We would very very much appreciate a cloud sharing solution, or a send/receive function (like in Paratext). - Is there any progress/result?
One question remotely in this context: We have just published one booklet that we thought is the newest version in all languages and now it turns out that it has an old recording in one of the languages. Is there a way to retrieve the good recording from another version and put it into this version? Or asked more generally, can different elements (corrected text, recording…) be isolated and taken from one version and combined together in another version? Rather than doing it all over again?
Desperately,
Anne-Marie
sorry John, I am really interested in this thread and am sorry I missed it. I don’t know if you still need feedback, but here is our process.
So mostly we manage by NOT sharing - the few times we have shared between us, it has been really disastrous with the starting settings sometimes different causing loads of confusion and wasted hours. we’ve used email, gdrive etc, but nothing was efficient, and often we ended up with a situation where it was easier to start from scratch. So over the pandemic, we worked by splitting the tasks as follows -
Each book is discussed - I work on the text and illustrators work on the images.
They send me the images and I put in all in, send the illustrator the pdf and we discuss changes on phone or we mark up on pdf/ image.
Once laid out to our satisfaction, the text goes to our interpreters for translation and the original gets voiced. I edit audio and then I complete all fiddling that needs to happen and upload the original.
By the time the translations come back and then the process starts again - this time with me and each language writer - edit, layout, send pdf, integrate changes, voice, etc.
Usually, before i upload to the website, I share the bloomd file so that people involved in that book can review on their phones. Once I get the final ok from all the collaborators, I upload.
Since we have a single point of upload, even when there has been changes by various collaborators - image or text or voice, I am able to integrate before uploading. Since i edit the audio files, when there is a mismatch or need for fine tuning text or audio, I can work with the various people involved and make the changes before I upload.
Hope this helps
Thanks everybody for your feedback and patience. Bloom 5.0 beta is now available (see announcement). We hope you will all be pleased with our first installment of “Team Collections”, which lets teams safely share a collection so long as they are occasionally connected to the internet or a LAN. In Bloom 5.1, we’ll follow on with a Book and Collection History features.
Please get in touch with me before deploying this to your projects so that we can learn from each other.
Early results from PNG’s Education For Life are positive… @Koen72 maybe you can give us a testimonial?
Also related to this request: the new Draft Option:
could you explain a bit more what is meant by “share a collection” ?
We have been using this feature a lot and it has been SO helpful. I initially understood it as a draft version that would allow my team to download and work on it and then upload back so the next member could pick up and add their bit in, but then realized that this was not to be.
Still, I just wanted to say, it is hugely helpful to share books in this form, giving the different people involved a chance to see and hear it and then send me the changes in include.
thank you for doing this!