Coventi is a new service for online editing and collaboration of documents. I used it to create a couple of documents, it worked as billed. I could create documents, invite other people to edit them, and then see the original and subsequent revisions in a Microsoft Word-like "track changes" mode.
The editing features were pretty primitive but I would expect them to add more capabilities as the service matures. Table editing would be high on my priority list.
A couple of interesting features were the "comment" and "suggest edit" sidebar conversations. In theory, you can select text and then add a comment in the sidebar that resembles threaded forum conversations. I say in theory because I couldn't get it to work. I think the comments sidebar is a useful component, I would like the option to have it configure it as a floating pop-up like how Google Talk works.
Speaking of things not working, Coventi supports Firefox but when I tried to run it from Camino it said it was an unsupported browser. If it runs in Firefox it should run in Camino.
There is a built-in address book, which is used to invite other people to collaborate on documents, but I really wish there was a way to integrate other address books into services (not just this one either). I already have an address book, would prefer that apps like this take advantage of that for contact data... of course, this is something that Teqlo is designed for!
I could upload draft documents in either Word or OpenDocument formats, and I could export documents in a range of formats, including PDF. Bulk uploading would be welcome, as would a file explorer type browser with document preview mode. I successfully imported some complex documents, but not others, in which case there was a helpful "may we inspect your document to diagnose the problem" interaction. Importing PDF documents would be a really nice feature.
The last thing I would bring up is that it's pretty difficult for a service like this to break away from the pack when the feature set they are offering is functionally equivalent to what other more established services are offering. I don't have the benefit of hearing what they have in store, and would certainly welcome that, but at this point I am left to wonder what the business model could possibly be in the face of a number of free offerings that are perfectly capable.
link to original post