"...something that just lets multiple folks work on a single document ... like the sort of simple system that could make wide-area collaboration much easier for companies that aren't ready to commit to a big back-end server solution."
HiveWare for Word is a document collaboration tool for Microsoft Word that allows two or more users to edit an active document at the same time without interfering with each other. Hiveware for Word is an add-on that uses peer-to-peer technology to share documents that evolve in real time as users collaborates.
Now this little program I like and I would think anyone could use this program, especially students who are working on group projects and need to write up a paper quickly and with everyone’s input. Of course, the business applications to this are ten fold because because the of the time it would cut down on typing something up.
Ref; Hiveware for Word – experimental group authoring – This plugin is intended for group authoring, and not proofreading. It lets Tom, Dick and Harry work on the same document like if Tom is working on the ‘Project Goals’ section, Dick can work on the ‘Scope’ section while Harry can work on another part of the document, and everything is merged into a single document in near real-time. Link.
Basically this is what is already being done by the likes of etherpad (now bought out by Google docs), Agilewords, sync.in etc. But in this startup idea we are adding a twist as to if we can crowdsource it.