What is Collaborative editing?
Collaborative editing takes teamwork to the next level by letting you and your team work together in real time on software requirements, meeting notes, retros, and any other Confluence page.
See who's editing a page with you and their cursor position, and see changes as they happen. Colorful avatars show who is editing right now, and grey avatars show people who have made changes and then left the editor.
Changes are automatically synced so that everyone editing sees the same thing. And, because we're saving all the time, there's no need to manually save. Your only decision is when to publish the changes.
We don't enforce a maximum number of people who can edit together, but we recommend you keep it to no more than 12 people editing at the same time.
Once you and your team are done editing you can:
- publish (or update if the page has previously been published) to make everyone's changes visible
- close the editor and keep everyone's work to finish later
- close the editor and discard everyone's changes.
We'll warn you if you're about to publish (or discard) other peoples' changes along with your own.
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Resuming your work
One of the wonderful things about collaborative editing is that you don't need to publish a page before you're ready.
Here's how you can resume working on your unpublished changes:
- If the page has been published previously, all you need to do is hit Edit and any unpublished changes will be ready and waiting.
- If you created the page, and it has never been published, head to Profile > Drafts to resume working on the page.
- If someone else created the page, and it has never been published, you'll need the URL of the editing session to resume working on it (as the page only appears in the original creator's Drafts list).
Features
Real-time collaboration Work together with your team and see their changes in real time. |
No more merge conflicts Collaborative editing uses shared drafts, so there's no need to merge because you're all working on the same page. |
No need to save. We’re on it Changes are auto-saved as you make them, so now your only decision is when to publish. |
Limitations
Limited content auditing We don’t yet have the same auditing capabilities with collaborative editing. All page changes are currently attributed to the person that publishes the page, rather than the person who made each specific change. |
Changes in drafts aren’t versioned We’re saving all the time in collaborative editing, but we don’t save versions in a draft. When restoring an earlier page version, you can only roll back to published versions (the page draft is deleted when you restore a previous version). |
Changes to drafts
Collaborative editing introduces a new type of draft, a shared draft. Previously when you edited a page but didn't save it, Confluence would create a draft that was only visible to you (a personal draft). Now, Confluence creates a shared draft whenever anyone edits a page. All page editors work on this same shared draft, and it exists until someone publishes the page.
When you publish a shared draft, you're publishing all the changes you have made and changes made by others. Publishing creates a version in the page history.
If you discard a shared draft, you're discarding all changes, including changes made by others. Because shared drafts aren't versioned, there's no way to get a discarded draft back.
Accessing your old personal drafts
If you used Confluence before collaborative editing was available you may have some old personal drafts. Your personal drafts are still available, but are no longer editable. If you edit a page, you'll see the shared draft of the page, not your personal draft (if one exists). If you need to get content out of your previous personal drafts head to Profile > Drafts, locate your page and copy the contents.