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This is my entry for a blogging contest organized by Indiblogger and Microsoft Office for Office 365

 http://www.office365.in

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I am a lover of words, words that can spark ground breaking ideas and strong emotions, words that can sooth and words that can bring about revolutions.

I am also a lover of collaboration, collaboration not just for Projects, but ideas. When two people get together to think together, it is always better than the sum of them individually.

I had this idea to get authors and writers together to write collaborative books, not science and course books but novels and stories. Think about how a story can go when not one but multiple authors give it shape. Thin about how many layers a character can have if multiple authors add one.

So yes my dream business would be collaborative books, a place where I can pair up young upcoming authors with new ideas and enthusiasm with the mosre experienced, who have the capability and experience to add nuances to the character of a story subtly .

Collaborative book writing

How can Office 365  help

Collaboration for Ideas:

Brainstorming

A small brainstorming website (Subsite) will be setup under the main site for every story project ,and will be accessible to only the authors collaborating on the story

The authors can initially start by brainstorming on Ideas on the built in discussion boards , this will also help in keeping record of all ideas.(Could be an Idea factory) Many authors use white boards for brainstorming. LYNC provides this facility and collaborators would be able to do that sitting anywhere in the world.

Idea factory could also help spawn off new story ideas for different novels and stories, hence making the idea machine perpetual 😀

Document Libraries:

Brainstorming screenshots and even things such as cover art etc could be stored in the document libraries. This will help authors see everything in one place.

For an artists it is extremely essential to see everything, Like you cannot write with conviction without actually experiencing it, every illustration in the book should be visible to the author as he/she writes, it can inspire him/her. Also many a times authors can simply convey ideas to each others as pictures rather than words. Picture libraries of SharePoint can come in real handy here

Story Writing

The best part would be writing the story, since now parallel editing is possible, both authors would be able to work on the same copy of the story. This will make sure that in the end the story created is consistent. All authors will be able to see the work of other authors and hence the issue of communication gap would not arise. The story board would also be versioned so that anytime the authors wish, they can go back to the original version.

Editing:

The storyboard, once done ,would be locked and only the editor would be able to edit it. Though the authors can always view the changes being made and also refer to the older versions . This will give the process of editing a whole lot of transparency and the authors will not feel like compromising with their creative expression. Authors can also stop an editor when they feel there is a  discrepancy.

Mobility :

As suggested in the title of this post “Ideas can strike anywhere“. This is very true especially in creative pursuits. What we need is access to the shared storyboard, anywhere and everywhere. Authors can get ideas sitting on a beach in Goa or maybe backpacking through the mountains or even driving though a desert. The main objective is to not lose that idea. I have personally lost a lot of ideas because I either do not write them or simply lost the envelope on which I noted it down. Cloud based Office 365 can help save this loss 🙂

Story readings:

After every book publishing how can we not have story readings by the authors. Lync conference calls can be used for that. Not only can we have multipel authors reading a part but also get selected audience to dial in and listen(They do not need to be users of Lync). The selected audience could also be other publishers in other countries to whom we might want to license these books.

So in the end let me present a short scenario, “The author sits on a beach, thinks that the hero of his story should be a Hippie  trying to find spirituality in Goa, while the author’s partner eating a hotdog in new york is thinking that the Girlfriend should be an ambitious young lady working as an investment banker…”

Here is a small diagrammatic depiction