Microsoft Office 2010 Co-authoring – Where We are

A big part of Word 2010 is enabling what we call cutting-edge authoring. Cutting-edge authoring is all about making deep enhancements in the core document creation experience in Word, given the types of documents people are creating today (i.e., a lot more than just plain text) and the way people are creating documents today (i.e., authoring with more than one person).
In this post, I'll focus on cutting-edge collaborative authoring,Office Professional 2010 Key, give a brief history of the types of collaborative authoring investments we've made in the past, and touch on some recent authoring trends that influenced our deep investment in cutting-edge collaborative authoring in Word 2010. In the Beginning Was the Digital Word…
…and the digital word wasn't especially collaborative. Back when the first version Word was released in 1983,Office 2010 Serial Generator, authoring digital documents was typically a solo activity. Generally, an author typed their document, printed it, and shared the printed copies. Feedback from other authors was either verbal or it was written on the printed copies.
As the years went on, we still saw only limited examples of authors sharing and collaborating on digital documents. We did, however, see more emphasis on moving digital documents between different versions of Word and other applications. Authors started to ask themselves, "Will my document look the same in this version as it did in the last version?" and "What if I wrote this document in another word-processing application?"
These questions led to Word's very first collaboration-esque features; features that focused on moving documents between other versions and applications. For example, Word added compatibility options to maximize version-to-version visual fidelity, and import/export converters to help with application compatibility. And Then There Was Email
The big shift towards collaborating on digital documents came with email. As email use became more mainstream (i.e.,Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007 Key, you could assume that all of your co-authors had email), collaboration on digital documents made a big move towards center stage. Suddenly, there were visions of the "paperless office" and digital documents flew from inbox to inbox. With an easy distribution medium, people started the document collaboration experience that is still the norm today:

Email certainly made sending and receiving documents easier, but unfortunately it did not do a lot in terms of the experience around collaboratively editing documents. You now had a lot of different versions of the document sitting in your digital inbox instead of in your physical inbox. Granted, digital copies were nice because you could use copy and paste, but you still needed to spend a bunch of time managing all of the versions. It was essentially the same experience that you had with printed copies, except that the copies were easier to send and receive. And actually, the ability to more easily send and receive lots of documents wasn't necessarily a good thing. Just like credit cards digitizing money made spending money much easier and more frequent, email digitizing document sharing made sending copies much easier and more frequent.
In fact, when you collaborate on a document via email attachments, you easily have upwards of n copies of the document, where n is the number of people on the email, times the number drafts you send out, plus the number of drafts you start with.
(recipients x drafts) + drafts = # of documents
So if you send five other authors a draft of your TPS report, and repeat the process two more times, then you may have 18 copies of your TPS report—(5 recipients x 3 drafts emailed) + 3 drafts on your hard drive—and one very unhappy person who has to manually merge the 18 copies into one. This manual merging process is why email-based document collaboration often ends with documents with titles like:
TPS Report_SallysChanges_TomsChanges_NeedBills_AddSumm ary_3rdReview_Thursday.docx File Shares and SharePoint
Another option authors used for sharing and collaborating on digital documents was the file share (and eventually document management systems like SharePoint). Unlike email, these document management systems provided a single "shared" document people hoped would avoid the need for multiple copies and manual merging. But the document wasn't truly shared because in reality only one author could edit it at a time. Things would start-off well—you'd have one shared version of the document (whoohoo)—but if anyone wanted to edit the document while someone else had the file opened, they got locked out, saved a copy locally, and started the multiple copies nightmare again (d'oh). And who could blame them? There's little else quite as frustrating as having a half hour to polish up a document only to see this dialog box when you go to edit it:
More and More Collaboration Features
Over time, we added more and more features in Word to dull the pain of email and file share collaboration. Change tracking and commenting, useful even while authoring alone, were especially useful when working with other authors. You still had to manually merge and make sense of all the copies of the document, but at least you only had to review the changes (track changes) and co-authors could make suggestions without impacting the layout of the document (comments). When it came to dealing with the actual versions of the document, document merge was a big step forward, and in Office 2003 we paired document merge with Document Workspaces, so that you could publish your document to SharePoint, invite authors, and manage the collaboration right within Word. The Next Step
The next step, though, was to think less in terms of adding individual collaboration features, and to think more about making collaborative authoring "just work" in Word. We wanted authors to be able to focus entirely on producing great content. We wanted to completely eliminate the pain of multiple versions and file locking instead of simply helping authors deal with the pain. We wanted to cure the disease instead of treating the symptoms.
And our push to make seamless and natural co-authoring a core part of Word couldn't have come at a better time. With the Web 2.0 movement becoming mainstream, so did the expectation that co-authoring should just work. In fact, we saw that in certain situations easy collaboration was so important that people were willing to trade rich features and formatting for it. A great example of this is from the Web 2.0 world is the wiki. There had been many examples of wiki-like solutions in the past, but the difference in the Web 2.0 era was that wiki-like collaboration was mainstream; even at the cost of the features and formatting. Trading features and functionality for easy collaboration is quite a compelling statement about the pains of email and file share collaboration. Authors were simply done with the hassle of myriad versions and getting locked out. They just wanted to author, and they needed to author with others.
And that's just what wikis enabled. One wiki is stored in a shared location. If you want to change the wiki, you change the wiki. Not one of 18 versions of the wiki that reflects Tom's first set of changes, Sally's second set of changes, and no changes from Steve or Mary. And authors don't save local copies, because they don't get locked out of the wiki. Everyone can edit the wiki anytime. Instead of multiple copies of the document, each with one author, you now have one copy of a document with multiple authors. Instead of a shared document that locked everyone out, you now have a shared document that everyone can actually share. And just like that, the whole manually merging myriad copies and file-locking hassle was gone. I Just Want to Write, With Others
A wiki's ability to let authors focus more on writing and less on managing or creating versions was super interesting to us. Here you have wikis, which despite their very basic feature set, changed the authoring game thanks to that fact that they were natively collaborative. Other compelling features available to wiki authors include the simple nature in which you can link to/create other content,Microsoft Office 2010, but it was the popularity of the wiki's collaborative authoring functionality that stood out to us, because it was similar to the direction we had been heading in terms of making co-authoring "just work" in Word.
So the question is: How can we get rid of the either/or? What if you didn't have to give up features, functionality, and familiarity to easily collaborate with others on a single document? What if you could focus on authoring rich documents while not worrying about managing who's doing what when on which version, and how or if you'll be able make sense of it on Friday afternoon? What if co-authoring rich documents just worked?
I mentioned some of the work we've done to address this in the "Introducing Word 2010" post,Cheap Office Standard 2007, and we'll get into more of the details in future posts that help answer those questions. Stay tuned.
- Jonathan Bailor <div