TextFlow Makes Document Collaboration Easy

cross-posted from bub.blicio.us

 I'm a social media consultant but really, in Cincinnati, that doesn't get me a lot of traction at the moment. So my bread and butter is instructional design and technical writing. It's not always the most exciting work, but it helps pay the bills. In the process of technical documentation, I may get two or three versions of the same document, edited by developers, SMEs, and overzealous copyeditors. I then have to incorporate all those changes into my master document. In the past, that's involved some hard copies, where I check things off as I integrate the changes.

It looks like that's all about to change. TextFlow by Nordic River made some news early last summer, but they've released their Adobe Air application in a new beta, and it looks pretty awesome. I haven't tried it out yet, but I'll be taking it for a test run in early January when I expect a documentation nightmare to appear on my desk. TextFlow allows you to drag different versions of a document into their app. It will merge them, highlighting the differences, and allow you to show the changes, hide them, and integrate them. From the perspective of a technical writer, this is a real timesaver. They have a fantastic (but non embeddable) demo video on their site, but here's a great video from C|Net's Josh Lowensohn demonstrating the product.