New online collaborative tools

We have two new online collaboration tools set up for campus use:

• Etherpad at https://plone4.webcluster.uwosh.edu/etherpad
• LodgeIt at http://plone4.webcluster.uwosh.edu:5000

NOTE: to use EtherPad and LodgeIt, you must be on the wired campus network *or* you must be connected to the campus network via VPN at http://vpn.it.uwosh.edu (you can request a VPN account by calling the Academic Computing Help Desk at 424-3020).

Etherpad is a real-time collaborative document editing tool in which you can instantly create a new document and invite other campus users to edit it LIVE at the same time as you.  Each user gets a different highlighting colour; you can export the document at any time (saving currently doesn't work - I am going to look into that); there is a built in chat system on the same page as well.  You can use a time slider to view the document as it was at any time in the past.  The only thing I ask is that you not consider an Etherpad document to be stored permanently; use it to quickly create a document, then export and save it elsewhere.  That is because if I fix the "save" issue there is always a chance I'll blow away the database contents inadvertently.  Etherpad as Marshall set it up requires that you log in with your usual LDAP credentials.

LogdeIt is a place you can paste any text, including error stack traces or bits of source code or configuration files.  Be aware that anything you paste there is visible to anyone on campus, so do not paste things that include passwords!  You can choose the syntax of the text you paste (eg. Python, XML, HTML) to get nice highlighting. When you look at a particular paste, click on the "Paste Details" bar and you can reply to a paste, download it, compare it to another one.