Collaboration in Gigantt

We're in the final testing stages of the first version of Gigantt that supports real-time collaboration. You can see what it's going to be like in our new preview video.

turn on your speakers for full enjoyment. :)


Gigantt takes a novel approach to collaboration. We want to allow multiple users editing the same plan at the same time - seeing each other's changes as they are made (like Google Docs, Wave) - but we don't want people stepping on each other's toes. Our solution is called a freeze period. Basically anything you touch while editing a plan in Gigantt gets frozen for everybody else for 60 seconds. So each user can safely edit his own area of the organization's big work plan.

This approach has the advantage of making it visibly clear when someone else is editing the plan with you, so you can avoid conflicts instead of having to resolve them. We think this is a better form of collaboration than what most other collaborative systems offer, where if two people are editing the same document one of them will be notified of a conflict once he tries to save his changes (e.g. Wikipedia). We believe true collaboration is not racing to save your changes before someone else does, but rather being aware of who's editing alongside you right now and being able to give each other just enough time to edit in peace.


Our apologies, again, for taking so long working on this release. We want to get it right. Many people have signed up for an invite to the private beta program - more than we can handle at this point. But once this collaboration release is finished we're immediately going to start working on the registration/invitation system (now it's all manual) so we can let more people in. Thanks for being patient.