Real-Time Collaborative Editor that is private?

Question

Are there any good real-time editors that are browser-based, offer some formatting (bold, underline, etc,) and are NOT served in an external server (such as Google Wave)? I'd like to serve a real-time collaborative editor inside of a VPN for three users. I've not found anything yet that would do such. Thanks for any suggestions.

Answer 1

Try Etherpad - http://etherpad.org - it's a mature, open source project and easy to host yourself. You could run it from a VM if you don't have a Linux box at hand.

There are plenty of free Etherpad servers (many listed at etherpad.org) so you can make sure it fits your needs before you go to the trouble of setting it up. (Note that the free versions usually don't include all the advanced features like groups and privacy that you will have when you host it yourself).

Answer 2

The latest version of MS Ofice does this, AFAIK, although it isn't browser based. Almost anything that is browser based will reside on another server (be it google docs or Zoho), although there may be some software out there that allows you to host your own server. I just haven't seen it.