ICE takes word processing documents and turns them into HTML and PDF automatically. Each time you make a change to a document you can see them immediately through your web browser.

ICE can run on a server, or on your Mac, Linux or Windows PC.

It talks to a content repository run by a version control system called Subversion that a system administrator sets up for a team. Subversion is a bit technical to use but ICE aims to make it easy to synchronise content.

It can manage distributed content when people are both offline and online.

It lets people comment on work in progress in the web browser and is ideal for group collaboration, reviewers, thesis supervisors and so on.

Technical point of view.

1. A standard set of names for word processing styles.

2. A replacement for the word processor toolbar that uses styles instead of direct formatting. See this demonstration.

3. Toolkit for building cross-platform word processing templates for Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org based on the above for discipline specific use. For example we have an APA template for people who want to write APA documents, with more being developed all the time.

4. ICE conversion services to turn word processing documents that use the above styles into XHTML (and beyond, to things like presentations via the magic of microformats) - there are now a variety of interfaces to this: Python libraries, command line, a web API, and integrated into the word processor. See setting up an ICE service

5. An IMS packaging application to link multiple documents into a coherent mini web site or export to Moodle as courseware.

6. For blogging from your word processor, an Atom Publishing Protocol client implementation.

7. A tool to collate word processing documents into books which takes care of cross referencing.

8. Some miscellaneous tools to help the scholar, such as the ability to turn links into footnotes for the PDF version of a document and strip-out links to the filesystem.

9. A web interface to Subversion to make it easy for ordinary users to collaborate with version control.

10. An annotation system to allow comments on documents, including inline comments.