Collaborative editing #811
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Hey @ryanprior, thanks for the question – I do think that the option for realtime editing is in the long term plans of Outline but it isn't top priority, we'd rather tackle a lot of the organizational problems first as there are already editors doing an excellent job of the realtime editing aspect. It's definitely something that could be incorporated into our existing editor codebase however and the Slate community is working on some solutions to this right now that we should be able to build ontop of 😄 |
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Even if real-time editing isn't a priority, the ability to share and ask someone to contribute to a document would be helpful. We're using Slack/Paper as an alternative atm. |
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This should be also considered as a bug, because the app has concurrency access issues. If I edit the document before someone else, the other one ends with an error when trying to save the document. Hope this will resolve soon, it's the only one feature I need, everything else seems perfect. |
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@tommoor just wanted to update you that I'm still looking forward to collaborative editing. From my perspective it's table stakes; I cannot picture an organization with many writers adopting new knowledge base tech that doesn't include collaboration. I'd be interested to know how you see the context around this, because I'm sure there are many other perspectives, but to share my view, those who can tolerate not having live collab are one or more of the following:
An organization that is medium-size or larger, with versatile team members who work across boundaries and want tools that are a joy to use, would be justified in immediately rejecting a knowledge base solution without even a second look if it lacks live collaborative editing. I hope that's a helpful perspective for you! I would love to assist you in realizing the vision of great collaboration in Outline, so please let me know if there's a way you'd prefer for those of us in the comments here to get engaged. 😄 |
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Hey @ryanprior – I agree with your perspective, there's no doubt that collaborative editing would really take Outline to the next level and we'll definitely get there but it's quite the technical undertaking that will likely take months of work to pull off. In the meantime I hope that the product can continue to serve as a store of less-changing team knowledge – in the cases where you need to collaborate on a document in realtime for example for meeting notes perhaps these may be archived in Outline (a tough ask, I know!) |
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Hello everybody Entering the Market with a new product, should be with features that are beyond state-of-the-art what the current market offers. Not having the standard features, in my point of view, would immensely devalue Outline. Collaborative Editing is surely one of the standard features, this one which should be top prioritized. I understand that a product needs to be first of all accepted by potential users, of course this with bare minimum features. But yes, what is minimum? I see Outline as a Village Saviour at this industry branch, knowledge management. Being a Saviour is being someone that people know that he is willing to fight a problem, which in this case is simplicity, ease of use, reliability and technology perfomance. My analogy is a little bit out of context but that's what we are doing. At a technical view, i have some ideas to solve this simply:
WebRTC is the big key role here :) What do you all think? Is this solution plausible? Best regards, |
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Hey André, thanks for the thoughts!
Thankfully the problem is largely solved at a high level with Operational
Transforms being the industry standard for modifying documents in
real-time. It’s just that integrating this is likely several months of work
so we’re tackling the low hanging fruit first
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I recall that you tagged this for Q3 2019. I'll be dedicating some time in the coming months that I could use to help make this happen- if you're still thinking on that timeline, let me know how I can help and who else is involved in this effort so we can sync up. :) |
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This looks like a decent solution, a bit more flexible than the out of the box prosemirror support: |
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Hey! The issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed soon if no further activity occurs. Please reply here if you wish for the issue to be kept open. |
Alpha Release
Cloud Beta Release
Self Hosted Beta Release (~8th Nov)
Production Release
Later
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@tommoor Not sure if I should comment on this thread or open a new issue. But the performance of this feature could use some improvements. When working in Chrome on a large document, the live editing is barely usable due to lag and performance issues. It works somewhat better in Firefox, but when the document grows, issues arise there as well. If you for example use a Word document with 100+ pages etc, that multiple editors are in, you should be able to reproduce this issue pretty easily. |
This is a much larger document than Outline has ever really supported – even before collaborative editing, the entire thing is rendered at once so this much text is going to cause performance issues irregardless. There are parts of the editor code that loop over all paragraphs, for example. If you're seeing performance issues on more regular sized documents then that's something that could be filed as a bug but really at this size you should probably be splitting your content up more. |
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Also interested if multiple editors being present makes a difference to the experience |
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@tommoor Thanks for your reply! 100+ pages was more of an easy way to reproduce it. The performance degradation is happening much earlier than that and I have seen it on documents that is more of the size of 20+ pages or so (estimate), but I guess the amount and type of actual content in those "pages" is also an important factor. |
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I've just been reminded that Chrome has recently had a bug where spellcheck caused all online text editors to significantly slow down, it could be that this affected your experience too, eg confluence: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-73213 You could try disabling spellcheck to see if that makes any difference in the meantime. Google Docs implements it's own spellcheck and disables the system one from what I can tell. |
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Google Docs renders its whole app in a big |
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Checkboxes can no longer be interacted with, with seamless editing. Is this intentional for now? |
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Hi @Snuupy – I'm not able to reproduce this behavior, are you sure the doc isn't in read-only permissions? The other possibility would be websockets having problems connecting. |
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@tommoor The doc is not read-only. I can check/uncheck on mobile but not desktop after enabling collaborative editing. Tried both chrome and firefox. Edit: Not working on desktop: https://giant.gfycat.com/AmusingUltimateEyas.mp4 No websocket errors in console, editing the same document (as in adding/deleting text) works on other devices. Working on mobile: https://giant.gfycat.com/InfamousShinyFalcon.mp4 Looks like a UI glitch where it thinks I'm dragging/dropping instead of checking the box as a leftover from the editor behavior. |
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Update: turns out it was the bitwarden extension causing some type of issue with the checkboxes. As soon as I disabled the extension, I was able to check and uncheck my boxes. The instructions to do so are: Settings -> Excluded domains -> getoutline.com (or whatever domain you use for outline) |
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Very strange, but I'm glad you were able to track it down! |
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With the new seamless editor, the "Rich service embeds" setting is not respected. Even if it is disabled in settings, embeds will still be shown in the editor. Tested on both self-hosted and getoutline.com. |
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Closing as complete as this has been rolled out to production for a while now. There are a few follow up tickets which have got their own label: |
Hi there! Teams that I work with regularly swarm on documentation to build out a knowledge base quickly or update one with new information. The ability to see & immediately act on others' edits, and attach comments and questions to them, can create a much more productive documentation writer experience.
Will you consider adding collaborative real-time editing to Outline? Is it something that's technically feasible with your rich text widget?
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