Best plugin for real-time collaboration on MS Office files such as word, excel, ppt, visio, etc?

[Manali Butey]

My team and I are torn between SharePoint 2019 (moving to SP Online in a few months time) and Confluence to create and edit ppt, excel, word and visio documents by multiple users at the same time and to be able to save changes to the same version whilst opening these files in their desktop native apps. Much like how we work on files in SP Online seamlessly w/o loss of data changes by multiple users in the same version of file uploaded back to the server. The non real time collaboration of the Companion app is making it hard to sell the product for use as a doc repo for the project. Another consideration is to refrain form plugins that require an app install on all user desktop as part of SOE. Understand if the best plugin to achieve the goal requires app install. The aim to have the functionality, not having to install the app s the cherry on top. Please suggest.

[Gonchik Tsymzhitov · Accepted solution]

Hi @Manali Butey , 

regarding replace office pack, you need to use a different apps. 

Hence you need to double check do you really need to have a real time?

Visio - Draw.io, gliffy (almost)

Word - not needed

But the office pack is our world will be for the long time, once Google Docs replaced. 

As Conclusion, I think no way for now

[Manali Butey]

Looked at a bunch of plugins but none fulfilled all my requirements and hence sticking to the hybrid SP-Confluence model.