Are there any applications that allow for real time collaboration on a Microsoft document?

Question

I have a customer who wants to be able to co-edit a .doc, .xls, or .pptx document in real time with their team.  This feature is supported in MS Teams and Sharepoint.  Does Confluence have this ability or is there a recommended application for this capability?

Phillip Renault · Answer

We are using Cloud and yes my customer is wanting to edit a word/excel/powerpoint with their team in real time.

A large majority of our formal documentation lives in our Confluence instance but most of that documentation is in the form of a .doc/.xls/.pptx and is frequently worked on at one time by the team, similar to a editing a Confluence page.

That formal document can then be saved within confluence and take advantage of Confluence's versioning.  One person can edit the document in place but not multiple people.

By doing this from w/in Confluence, I as a data manager can have better awareness/control over the documentation.  When the team takes it to MS Teams or Sharepoint, which is not run by my team, we loose site of it to include versioning, restoration etc.  However, our true source is confluence.  We are trying to assist the team and mitigate the risk of docs moving between systems.

Barbara Szczesniak · Answer

@Phillip Renault Are you using Cloud or Data Center? This may affect the features available to you.

That said, I'm trying to understand your use case. If what you are trying to co-edit are Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, rather than Confluence pages, what are you trying to achieve by doing this from within Confluence?

Phillip Renault · Answer

I have found the following but can't find documentation that they support the capability required.

* Live Docs
* Office Editor
* ONLYOFFICE Connector
* ONLYOFFICE Docs