Tran: It is a warning.

BTW: Concurrent editing is not available for server yet.

Thanks Chris, the info in that diagram is pretty bleak.

Enabling the plugin and then disabling it without editing of any documents is harmless at this stage to the overall integrity of Confluence Server?

Tran and Alex, you might be interested in the "Things you should know" that you are presented with when you go to the page to turn on the beta on cloud instances.

Same here, still waiting for self-hosted beta invitation. Hope to get one soon!

Long time lurker is this issue: so is the beta plugin usable in the server instances at the moment or restricted to just Cloud beta participants?

@Matt Lawrence (et. al) Early feedback from out team here is very positive. Had a long planning session yesterday with 4 separate editors working on the same wiki page with lots of tables and content. Rock solid performance throughout the whole meeting.

We will report anything unusual as soon as we see it but I wanted to pass along our experience so far.

Great job on such an important feature. Thanks!

This doesn't relate to attachments. Just page content.

Does this also account for documents that have been uploaded and for multiple people editing that or is this ONLY for page editing?

Hi erick.crowell - we're rolling out to all of the registered beta testers as fast as we can. We're not running to a fixed schedule, as part of the timing depends on us fixing issues that we find as we go. I reckon we'll get to you in the next couple of weeks.

Matt Lawrence
Confluence Product Manager

Is there a Beta schedule that can be shared?

Our instance of Confluence cloud does not have the Beta enabled, would love to understand the roll-out time-line if one is available to share.. We are ready to give feedback and help get the Beta ready for production!

Beta is live on our Cloud instance.

The new 5.10.0 m03 server release has a non-functional (beta) configuration page for concurrent editing with some remarks / implications when switching to collaborative editing.

Last communication I had was that the Beta had started on some smaller instances but they didn't want to try it on some of the larger ones yet but that was probably a month or 2 ago. So I suspect the beta has gone tremendously well in discovering some really painful bugs that they are trying to resolve now so it doesn't end up a huge mess when they release it.

@Sherif Mansour, Atlassian ...

Do you have an estimate of when the Beta program might start? Within this quarter, next quarter, next year ...

Our organization is trying to decide where to standardize; Google Docs. vs. Atlassian Confluence Cloud. I'd like to talk to when this functionality might arrive to help steer toward Atlassian . please help me.

Here is the Beta Sign up link (from the description above):
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1U-fAo3ReWyHXjF6_nocGzRbf6dM-qgbxAAIXOx9MGBs/viewform

I tried to sign up for the beta from a link in an email notification. The document appears to be locked now. Please consider this my notification that I'm very interested in being included in the beta. Thanks.

erick.crowell this issue is the best place to check for the status. As per the message above - we're still actively working it and are super eager to get it to you guys! We're also keen to make sure we get this right. This change has some very significant architectural changes to the product so it's important we proceed with caution. We've been using this feature internally for a while know and will shortly be able to roll this out to Cloud customers first, then at to Server customers later.

As jhult has spotted with his awesome detective skills - it's coming very soon to Cloud. We will update this ticket with progress when it's ready.

I have not received any further email updates about this.

I did notice the following for the Confluence Collaborative Editor Plugin (1.0.49-D20160322T031952).

However, I don't know the configuration settings:

I have also been waiting to hear back on the self-hosted trial option after submitting the beta request weeks ago. Based on Jonathan Hult's post on 3/3, they pushed it out another 2 weeks, but that was nearly 4 weeks ago.

Atlassian, is there a better place to check the status of this feature?

We have requested to be part of the Beta but so-far we've had no response from anyone at Atlassian.

We are turning to Google Docs to get this functionality, please share the status (good or bad)!!

Is there a way to get a self-hosted trial version with the beta code included? This is a big sticking point with using the current product as I evaluate it.

How will I know if I can join the beta program? I've filled in the form (twice) but not heard anything back...

Hello, how do I sign up for the beta program to test this feature in our test environment? In our agile culture this collaborative feature is crucial.

There is a BETA coming soon. It was originally scheduled for the week of February 22.

Thanks again for signing up to our Confluence collaborative editing BETA program! You're good to go - we plan to begin upgrading instances that have signed up for the BETA from next week onwards.

The collaborative editing feature should be enabled on your instance sometime during the week starting Monday, February 22nd. We'll drop you a line once your instance has been upgraded.

However, the BETA got pushed back 2 weeks.

I just wanted to get in touch to let you know that the start of the collaborative editing BETA program is being delayed - sorry for neglecting to send through an update earlier.

We've discovered a few more issues that need to be fixed before BETA testing can start. Sorry for any disruption and disappointment that this timing change causes - we know that a lot of people have been looking forward to this feature for a long time, so we're working hard to address the remaining issues as quickly as possible.

At this stage, we expect to upgrade your instance with collaborative editing in approximately 2 more weeks.

When we have turned the feature on, I'll let you know via email (and we'll also show a notification within Confluence). In the meantime, please let me know if there's anything else I can help with!

Two years is more than enough time to have this done (no matter the complexity). For the company I'm working, this is a must. Co-editing is so urgently needed that I'm seriously considering switch from confluence to an alternative environment.

Any news on this?

It was announced at Summit 2014. It's now March 2016.

Will I be able to extend this multi edit real time API in my custom plugin ?
Eagerly waiting for this feature to see in action.

Can the BETA version be switched on per space or does it affect the whole instance/site?

It's worth noting the status is still "Open", yet a BETA version is available

not yet...

does this plugin exist?

I tried it a few minutes on a hosted test instance (5.9.3). It's very basic so far: only doing some notification of concurrent editing, and automatic merging.
I didn't face any clear bug (as I said it was a 5 min try).

I tried it with 5.9.2 -> Doesn't work, displays error message

It is in the hosted version of 5.9.2 but similarly disabled.

Anyone tried enabling it?

It is in 6.0 OD but sadly disabled for now
Guess its still in testing and tweaking stages

Just saw that Confluence OnDemand is on Confluence 6.0 OD but still no concurrent editing

Was part of the business teams keynote "Early 2016..."
https://youtu.be/4rMS_MKMyAc?t=14m25s

philip.colmer I guess this is a good sign

Source: https://twitter.com/WBuggenhout/status/662058720818413568

And from Atlassian/Confluence's Twitter: https://twitter.com/Confluence/status/662094245914935301

Just watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mz0MY3V58J8&list=PLaD4FvsFdarStWjRfToP_CYcOTHYQibAY&index=86 (the Confluence and HipChat Keynote from last year's Summit) and Live Editing is expected to appear in 2015 ...

I wonder if there will be a further announcement at this year's Summit? I get the feeling that both HipChat and Confluence are due some announcements soon .

Yeah, I saw that after posting. I was looking at the top where I saw what I thought was the official status:

Atlassian Status as of December 5, 2013

In any case, as it stands the merging feature is clearly broken. I wanted to roll this out for our company but cannot in good conscience do that for fear of all the problems when multiple people edit a page and end up throwing other people's changes out. Too dangerous.

@Brent Browning - Last Atlassian comment happened May 15, 2015, from Sherif Mansour, 3 comments above your own.

Am I reading this correctly, the last official statement from Attlassian was in December, 2013???

Is this product being actively supported?

Are user requests being implemented?

At the bare minimum at least fix the alerts that say "your changes will be merged". That gives the second user a false sense of hope. Give them the option to cancel and edit later or be notified when the page is available for edit. If you have a limitation either fix it or warn users.

Hello! Any updates? This is the last thing preventing us from migrating from Google Docs (now that inline comments have been added!)

You may want to update the "Atlassian status" in the description of the issue.

benjamin.smith wow, feels like we're building a nice rumor community around Atlassian releases . Anyone want to start a http://www.macrumors.com equivilant, but for Atlassian? (joking)

I will correct you in saying this: We will have as many releases between 5.x and 6.x as we need to to ensure that if/when we deliver this improvement it works well. Our release gate (especially for something as major as this) is quality bound, not date or feature bound. We need to get this one right for you and your teams.

If you are going to comment on this feature suggestion, please do be mindful that we've got over 200 watchers on this ticket.

We will update this suggestion if and when when we have further news for you.

Thanks for your patience!

alex295 I believe this feature is coming in Confluence 6.0 & the last revision of Confluence 5 will most likely be 5.8 that is due for release on May 19th according to their JIRA Product Roadmap for Confluence.

This comes from research of multiple sources throughout social media, blogs & announcements by Atlassian & partners which I've come across over the last couple of months.

@Atlassian correct me if I'm wrong

Any idea when this is coming.

Doesn't look like it was added in 5.7

This issue seems like it is going to be addressed sometime in 2015. It was brought up during the Atlassian Conference.

http://blogs.atlassian.com/2014/09/summit-2014-announcements-keynote/

4: Collaborative editing and first-class files
If you’re like us, you use Confluence constantly. And it’s not uncommon for two or more people to need to make updates to the same page at the same time. That’s why we’re bringing real-time collaborative editing to Confluence. (yes!) Timeframe for delivery is a bit nebulous at this point, but the dev team is already plugging away on it. As exciting as that is, let’s face it: not every document can live as a Confluence page. So we’re giving files and attachments the first-class treatment in the upcoming 5.7 release. You’ll be able to share files through Confluence and collaborate on them in much the same way you already do with pages, using @mentions and in-line comments. Oh, and in-line commenting? Yeah, that’s coming to Confluence pages in 5.7, too.

I've just noticed this issue is also on Atlassian Answers, please upvote the request here https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/223304/realtime-concurrent-page-editing-like-google-docs?continue=https%3A%2F%2Fanswers.atlassian.com%2Fquestions%2F223304%2Frealtime-concurrent-page-editing-like-google-docs&application=acac so this issue gets more visibility.

Not sure if others have the same experience that I remember, but in the "olden" days, two users could not edit the same page without getting the "another user has changed the page you're editing" warning, which forced you to enter a diff session. In recent versions of Confluence, I was surprised to discover that multiple editors can edit the same page and that Confluence does a good job of automatically merging changes when they're submitted. The result is that multiple users can edit a page simultaneously (with overlapping saves and edits) and have a good chance of their changes being accepted without a diff session. Of course, these editors cannot see each others' changes in realtime (like in Google Docs), but it's an improvement over the old behavior. Where I saw this capability "shine" was in an editing session where multiple editors were in the same room all editing the same page. The utility of the current approach is much less when the editors are distributed geographically.

+1 for me

one more +1 to this

I echo everyone's comments (and passion!). We too need functionality that gives the team the ability to edit simultaneously within the same Confluence space. Let's make it happen, thanks!!

We are currently using Skydrive to keep our project/task lists by department and need multiple employees editing the same document at one time, and it would just make so much more sense to have this feature available in Confluence where everything in these Skydrive documents usually has some reference to a wiki page.

+1 - a game-changer that would allow us to move away from Google Docs for everything except more formal word processing.

We would like to see this as well, at present we experience issues where meeting agenda notes are overwritten by other users due to multiple user edits.

I don't actually use Etherpad. Just providing it as an example for them to use, since it is open source.

For etherpad:
do you host your own instance?
Use a public instance?
do oyu integrate wusing the IMG etherpad Lite connector?

If not for the last, I wouldn't see the benefit over using google docs?

Best way to do it is with Operational Transformation à la Etherpad.

For locking we have a solution ready: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/net.seibertmedia.plugin.confluence.edit-lock

That's what our customers get as a kind of circumvention. Works nice. But is not close to concurrent editing. Just a little hassle-prevention. The best we can offer right now.

+1 for both Matt and Kevin's comments. I'm hoping to rolling out to 100-150 users in 2014, and with only 10% of them being technical enough to understand versioning, this is an uphill battle that collaborative editing would solve.

If it really is going to be 12 months. Then I vote for the ability to lock a page whilst its being edited.

At least then people wont have to live in fear of stepping on each others toes.

"large undertaking" Writely did it in 2006 with four people.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Docs#History

Exactly. This might be a large undertaking, but at the same time it is a hugely important feature. I have just implemented Confluence with a group of about 200 users and fears of editing conflicts has been an enormous hindrance to adoption.

I see that people decide not to use the product at all because of, "you go ahead", "no you go ahead" among the non-technical users.
It's waste of time trying to explain that everything's versioned and you can back out anyway. Just too complicated for them.
Real-time editing avoids all of that silliness and the product use would go through the roof. We have over 1000 employees yet will never be able to justify license for anyone other than the technical teams.

Perhaps Atlassian could collaborate with Adaptavist, for a faster turn around for this feature's release? http://www.adaptavist.com/display/labs/Concurrent+Editing

It's a huge undertaking. A proper three-way-merge would not be so much. Think crucible.

This (along with better tables) is the most obvious feature to get into place. Anyone who has ever used real-time editing in Google's solution hungers for the same functionality in Confluence.

Edit conflicts are a major source of pain. PLEASE prioritize this more than "12 or more months" away!

> 12 months away? So sad.

Agreed.

Would it take less than 12 months to allow others to see the edits being made? That is one of the biggest criticisms I've received in regard to the meeting notes functionality - people cannot see the notes as I write them. That is a huge loss of functionality compared to the currently preferred in-house solution of Google Docs.

Etherpad implements this without needing to send data off to a 3rd party server ...

> 12 months away? So sad.

Can we just just lock the page to edits while its being editted, if you cant code a merge strategy. This seems like it would not be too difficult.

I dont mean asking the user to go into page restrictions and lock the page by hand, then remember to unlock it by hand when they are done.

Sysret - Good thought, but it looks like Firepad requires that your data (code in Stash's case) gets passed to the Firebase server. That's going to be a non-starter for a lot of organizations, so if Atlassian is working on this (and I hope they are), perhaps they are working toward something completely self-hosted.

why is this so complicated. atlassian integrated a real time editing client on stash called firepad.
isn't possible to integrate same technology in confluence?

Google's SPDY and Coffee Script now enable usable performance for these sorts of collaboration features I suspect.

It is surprising that this feature doesn't exist already.

Since you've already built a similar feature for your Stash product, can you please share the road map and timeline on this feature?

If you don't plan on building it soon, then help us utilize Etherpad Lite (or something similar) to accomplish it.

While offering Google Apps integration may sound like a solution, it's not. Most organizations will NOT maintain both Google Apps AND Confluence. Forcing your users to use both just to get the simple feature of real-time editing is not smart.

So please let us know if/when this will be possible in Confluence.

This is "THE KILLER FEATURE"! You should already work on it! When Confluence meet Google Doc, it's everything I dreamt of!

Is this on the Confluence's roadmap for implementation? If yes, when can this feature be expected?

It is must have!

How is this not assigned already? Why do I still have to use Google Docs and then move things into Confluence?

How can a collaboration tool not allow collaboration without overwriting each other?

It is cumbersome to use both Google Docs and Confluence and this is a requirement in a time of distributed teams and real time collaboration. Our company (and many others) are facing an either/or Confluence/Google Docs decision. With this feature Confluence is the winner.

Hope some Atlassian Guy will reply this thread. It's really a stopper for my boss to continue the MA.

Moonshine: it's only for Stash. Thanks for help. But I would like to see this function in Confluence more. Maybe someone can help?

We'd like to move more people from G Docs to Confluence as well, but this is a roadblock. I have some hope after seeing this Atlassian plugin for Stash:

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.atlassian.stash.plugin.stash-editor-plugin

Lack of this key feature is hampering user adoption of Confluence. This is a must have. Upvoted.

+1. We can't move all our documents from Google to Confluence without this.

In times of Google Docs, this is a must-have!

Just upvoted. The developers at my company are frustrated too by lack of collaborative editing, and have stopped using it for one of our new projects - which effectively trashes the goal of centralizing all project info in one location!

Yes. Yes please! If you added this, my team wouldn't have to use Google Docs for requirements gathering...

This is must have feature!
We are also getting frustration from users due to lack of this functionality.

This is a big plus for us. We do a lot of real-time collaborative editing.
We have to use google docs for the duration of the working session and then paste into a Confluence page.

We recently dumped gliffy in favor of create.ly for this capability.

I voted for this also. Hope this gets implemented sooner.

I have voted for this as well. We have a ton of smartboards scattered all over the world and people are continuosly trying new software to collaborate this way.
Confluence is a widespread product in our company and most people would be familiar with confluence and love a new feature like this!

I'll vote for this as well. Concurrent editing is becoming more expected and really, a smarter way to work.

I second this. I just lost an edit due to this lack of functionality - not good for productivity.

My 2¢: This is a very big advantage for Google Docs over Confluence. I hope we can get it implemented someday.

Like Muhammad, we're forced into using Google Docs because of our collaborative editing needs. I'd rather use Confluence.

This feature is also very important for us. Right now if we need a collaborative editing of a document we would go to docs.google.com, and then copying it back to confluence. Really, this feature would make Confluence much better.

You might be interested in the plugin I just released. It basically automates the etherpad integration Burke mentioned above by injecting an "Edit in Etherpad Lite" option into the Tools menu of every page you are allowed to edit: https://plugins.atlassian.com/plugin/details/530139

It's a commercial offering, though (free for non-commercial Confluence instances).

We use our own instance of etherpad in combination with Confluence, using etherpad for collaborative editing of meeting notes and Confluence for less dynamic documentation. It's not bad, but Confluence with the real-time collaborative power of etherpad would be game-changing.

The ultimate wiki would combine real-time synchronous edits by any number of people (i.e., etherpad-like collaboration) with fluid editing (e.g., shift+click or click-and-hold to begin editing anywhere on the page in place). Whether you are editing or just viewing a page, you'd see any changes from others as they happened (character for character). Editing the page would be barely more than clicking somewhere on the page to get a cursor and start editing in place.

Maybe someday.

Hmmm... this gives me an idea: embedded etherpad (an Etherpad macro to embed an etherpad into a Conlufence page). I'll have to experiment.