Today Julie (@jfj1997) and I were working on a document together. As usual, since we’re “cobbler’s kids”, we were emailing a Word document back and forth.
No way! We decided to share the document from one of our OneDrives and started editing online. I’m in Oslo, Norway at the Arctic SharePoint Challenge (more about that in another post) and Julie is back home in New Hampshire, so we were working with both a geographical and time zone difference, just like many people do these days.
The co-authoring experience seems a lot better than either of us remembered it. (In fact, there have been improvements to the experience over the last few months – it’s hard to keep up!)
Here are the things we really liked about this little experience…
By clicking on Review / Show Edit Activity, we could see what the other had been up to. Because I’m at ASPC2017 as a judge, I was interrupted several times (which was totally appropriate), and when I turned back to the document, I could see what Julie had been up to.
As we were editing, we could easily see what the other was doing, as there were little colored flags which moved along with the edits as they happened. In essence, it meant that we could see each other’s cursors in the document. This helped not just to see what the other was doing, but also as we were each adding new ideas into the document, we were able to avoid stepping on each other’s toes.
At one point, it felt like it would be a good idea to discuss a certain point we were making in the document. By clicking on the Chat button, we got an embedded chat window within the editing experience where we could have that discussion (and give each other a little crap when it was merited).
As with many of the new things that roll out to Office 365, I have been skeptical of the utility of this co-authoring experience. However, having been through this single experience working on a document with Julie, I think both of us are likely to use it many more times. It’s not necessarily useful in every editing scenario, but in this case it moved us forward much more quickly than any of the previous ways we might have worked.
References
by
Marc D Anderson via Marc D Anderson's Blog
