In my company, we still have to use Google Docs and Dropbox Paper to collaborate in a document before it’s final. This is far from ideal because it creates one extra unnecessary step and a lot of my colleagues just end up leaving the final document in Docs or Paper.

We will never be able to have full adoption of Guru in the company if the tool doesn’t cover the full process of knowledge creation: drafting - feedback - publishing.

Collaboration is a feature that Guru is lacking and should be prioritised, especially in a remote-working world we live in right now.

Any idea when this might be implemented?

Hi! One of our biggest struggles is to get supporting teams using Guru to its full purpose, starting with making sure new content is created as a card. Here is some feedback from our product marketing team which would be a strong team to persuade to use Guru more often. 

They don't find it to be a good collaboration tool. When my team members draft content and want to tag other team members for commentary/additional data, they can't find a good way to do so in Guru and revert to Google Docs. 

Hoping my upvote contributes to the request. Thanks!

Hello, I am wondering what the current roadmap plan is regarding this feature. Is Guru planning to implement collaborative editing within the next 6 months? 

Hi @Vera Green, 

Now that the new editor is on its way out to customers, we’re starting to shift some energy towards this highly requested improvement. It’s too early to provide a timeline or describe exactly what this will look like but work has begun and this is the next major area we’ll be working on in the authoring space. 

@Laura Desmond-Black and others - is there currently some suggested guidance/best practices on how we can handle/find instances when multiple users have been in editing mode at the same time, have published, but only one set of edits is captured in the card? I guess I am concerned about instances where this might have happened and we’ve lost some knowledge. 

Hi @Lynn Miller,

Sadly I don’t have a good suggestion for this, it’s one of the reasons we’ve begun looking at collaborative editing (specifically we’re starting with allowing multiple people to access the same draft). Revision history is the best thing I can think of, though you describe the gap that it only captures what gets published (let alone the scalability of searching through past versions). As a proactive, but time consuming option, perhaps temporarily assigning a card to a particular person as verifier and communicating that they are going to edit the card might help but again, that’s tough to scale, and takes extra work.   

I would also suggest that inline comments is a small bite you could take out of the enormous collaborative editing apple - being able to invite commenters to not only comment on the whole card, but to highlight a specific piece of text and comment on that. As a small step on the journey of inviting more collaboration work on cards before you get to the whole enchilada. Hmm, maybe I need some more breakfast...

First, hi everyone!

To follow up on my comment from last month, we've completed additional investigation into how to offer collaborative editing functionality and we now have this work scheduled. Based on that I'll update the status of this post. It's still early to share exactly how this will look (or a timeline) but we're aiming for something similar to Google docs where you can see who else is in a draft and see their updates live, as they are made. We're can’t wait to be at full steam on this work!

Second, hi @Dan Rinzel, I hope you were able to locate more breakfast  

To add to my other reply, one of the reasons we're focusing on shared drafts and collaborative editing first is that we believe a lot of the value of inline comments lies in people collaborating on the same content before publishing it. In order to support that use of inline comments we need to let people access the same draft content and if we do that we need to ensure people don't collide while editing. If we were to offer inline comments before solving those gaps, people would need to maintain the complex workflows they have today for collaborating on content before publishing it. Another big reason for addressing shared drafts and real-time collaboration first is those complex workflows--they are very time consuming and create other headaches. On the implementation front we’re optimistic about what we're planning for this, it shouldn't be too difficult to get through. As soon as we complete this work we'll be on to inline comments for drafts and published cards.

Hi @Laura Desmond-Black any chance there is an update to share here regarding estimated timelines? TIA!

Hi @Ilse Labuschagne, 

We turned on the early version of this functionality for our own internal instance of Guru last week so we’re making progress! We still have work to do but it should be on the order of weeks, not months. We are very eager to get this out to everyone and moving as quickly as we can while ensuring the new version of this critical workflow will be smooth and reliable when released.

I’M SO EXCITED!!!!!!! @Laura Desmond-Black 

Hi everyone,

Great news - last week we began releasing the new collaborative editing and shared drafts experience which lets authors share drafts and then work on them at the same time. We expect to finish releasing the new experience this week. Hopefully this makes it much easier for you all to create new Cards and update existing ones!

I AM THRILLED!! @Laura Desmond-Black 

We’re glad to hear it @kelly  !!

@Laura Desmond-Black thank you so much!!!