Companion App vs legacy Edit in Office functionality

[Michal Michal]

What are the pros/cons of these alternatives?

I think it was more intuitive to see "Edit in Office" in the attachment list rather to clicking on the attachments to get the "Edit with" option.

[Alex K]

Hi @Michal Michal ,

Atlassian Companion is Confluence's primary file editing feature. We have made huge improvements recently in Confluence 7.3 and Companion 1.1.0, see this community post for details. Also, this documentation page for Edit Files may be useful. 

Firstly, I will note that editing a file from Companion can be launched from all the same places as Edit in Office, and more, including the attachments macro, attachments page and office and PDF macros. 

The following comparison is for Confluence 7.3 (with Companion 1.1.0) and above. 

Companion

• Supports any file type that has a compatible desktop application that can save the original attachment in place (e.g. won't work if you have to render a new video file to save changes).
• Allows the user to work on the same file for up to two weeks, and re-upload it any number of times during that period.
• Allows the user to concurrently edit and manage multiple files at the same time and will warn the user if the version of the file they are editing is stale.
• Companion supports Windows and Mac, but not Linux.
• Compatible with virtual desktop (terminal server) environments. 

Edit in Office

• Directly integrates with the Office application, whether that be Microsoft Office, LibreOffice or OpenOffice.
• Only supports Microsoft Office document, presentation and spreadsheet file types. 
• Has limited support for Windows, Mac and Linux depending on the specific version of the office application used.
• Is compatible with virtual desktop (terminal server) environments. 

Edit in Office is considered "legacy" and has a number of open bugs including a limited editing time, incompatibility with certain OS versions and Office application versions.