How can i setup collaborative editing of documents?

[Brad Schabel]

I have a group of individuals who need to edit documents together - Word, PPT and Excel. How do I execute that form of collaboration via Atlassian?

Thanks.

[Mike Rathwell]

Hi @Brad Schabel 

Confluence is a bit different than using, for example, O365 or G-Suite in that one doesn't edit static/discrete documents attached to a page/space. Rather the collaboration comes in where multiple people can edit the same Confluence page at the same time (assuming a reasonably recent version of Confluence) and is there out of the box (unless your admin disabled it).

In many ways this is a Better Way to Go for a couple of reasons:

• In Confluence, there are rather less ways to format a given page (macros notwithstanding) so it's less likely you get a document with borked formatting as is so often the case in MS Word, for example.
  • If you need a static Word document created at various points in time, you can use something like Scroll Office to export a doc that looks like your corporate ones from the Confluence page(s). 
  • The source content is always in Confluence giving you a single source of truth for the content
• O365 and G-Suite, unless one is using shared drives with broad permissions across the content in the drives, needs to have content explicitly shared with those that are collaborating. Confluence is somewhat the inverse; once the permissions to various content trees are set, the content is implicitly shared with all. If you then set up watchers on the space, page, what have you, they all get active notification when/if content changes.

Text documents are particularly easy to do this with Confluence. For the more spreadsheety kinda things as well as PPT, you'll need some extra plugins (and a search of marketplace.atlassian.com will find lots of good tools. That said, a consideration is that rather than distributing static, discrete, and... dead... documents you can distribute a link that is always right.

Good luck and always reach out back in this community for help and guidance. When you start down the rabbit hole and you run up against a specific thing to do, someone will have likely been there before.