EtherPad: Real Easy Real-Time Collaboration Tool

Sometimes less is more. EtherPad may be the easiest real-time text collaboration tool you and your students can use. Unlike Google Docs or Zoho, NO REGISTRATION, NO EMAIL ACCOUNT is needed. Collaborators simply need to share a unique URL which can even be customized.

EtherPad features

• No account required
• The only really real-time collaborative editor on the web
• Edits highlighted in author's color
• Infinite undo history
• Syntax highlighting for editing code
• Every keystroke backed up

EtherPad stacks up favorably against other online text collaboration tools in other ways as well.

• Some other online editors are cumbersome to share with other people. It requires sending an email, and all collaborators must have an account. With EtherPad, you just copy and paste a link, no emails or accounts required.
• Some do not highlight who typed what, so with more than two editors, things get chaotic and confusing very quickly. EtherPad makes things clear by highlighting each author's contributions with a unique background color.
• One of the most basic operators for editing text is "undo." While collaborating in some editors, you lose undo history whenever someone else makes a change. EtherPad supports infinite undos and ensures that every operation is forever undo-able, even in the presence of other editors.

EtherPad is a tool for a specific purpose, and depending on your needs, other editors may be a more suitable option for working together on documents. For example, EtherPad doesn't support rich-text editing or document embedding.

The etherpad.com web site is a FREE service. You can create your own pad and share with up to eight people. Some minimal security is possible through the randomized URL.

Because there's no account required (or even available) the product is easy to use , but that also means EtherPad doesn't keep track of a list of your pads online. If you lose the URL, your document is lost forever. The only way to keep your pads private is to safeguard the URL.

For more features and better security there are pay versions, either the Private Network Edition which you can download and run on your own servers, or the On-Demand Edition which EtherPad will host for you.

EtherPad ScreenCast - EtherPad FAQ

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