Files.com provides a convenient co-authoring experience for files within your site. Your users can collaborate freely with other users and share link recipients - including commenting, reviewing and accepting changes. Real-time collaboration, even for dozens of users at once, is quick and pain-free.

Co-Authoring Requires An Online Editor Integration

When co-authoring a document, all of the people editing the document must be using on the editor integration within Files.com, either the Files.com editor or Microsoft Office for Web.

The online editor cannot be used with other remote editors. For example, if a document is stored in a remote mount of a SharePoint server, your users cannot simultaneously edit that document through the Files.com editor and through SharePoint online. Their edits will not be shared, as the people working in SharePoint will be using one copy of the document and the people working in the online editor integration will be using a different copy. Whoever saves the document last will overwrite all of the changes made using the other system without any warning.

Files.com does not support co-authoring with desktop programs. When a user opens a document using the Desktop Application directly on their device at the same time that users are editing the document in the online editor, they are editing different copies of the file. If the desktop user saves the document before the online session ends, the online editor's changes will overwrite the desktop user's changes.

Saving Changes

When you use an online editor to make changes (including co-editing with others), the working file is temporarily copied to the editor sub-system.

As you make changes to the document within the Files.com editor, changes are automatically uploaded from the editor system to your site every 2 to 5 minutes. When the Files.com editor is closed, any remaining changes are uploaded from the editor system to your site. This results in a small delay before changes are reflected in your site.

After the changes have finished uploading, the last modified time of the file in your site will reflect that recent activity, and you can preview or download the most recent version from your site.

Logging Changes from a Co-Authoring Session

Using an online editor integration to work on a standard business document file creates new entries in your file activity history. The interface for these entries will be "Office".

Creating a new work document appears in the logs as creating the file, just as if you uploaded it.

While you are editing a file using an online editor, the editor will automatically save your changes every 2 to 5 minutes. Leaving the editor open for several minutes with no changes will not trigger uploads back to your storage from the editor. These actions will appear as changes in the file history.

During a co-authoring session with multiple people, all the entries in the activity history will appear with the user ID of the first person to start the session.

When you close the online editor, any changes that have not been saved yet will be automatically saved, and this will appear as a change in your file history.

Logging versus Track Changes

When more than one person is editing a file at the same time, Files.com history logs will only show the first person who opened the editing session as if they made all the changes. Even if other users make edits during that session, the history logs will still show the original editor as the one who did everything. Once the session is over, there's no way to see in Files.com which user made which specific edits.

Enable Track Changes to determine which collaborators are making specific edits. When you turn on Track Changes in the Files.com editor, your changes are treated as suggestions so that others can see exactly what was edited. Teams review and discuss changes before accepting them into the final version. Each edit is labeled with the editor’s name and a timestamp, making it easy to follow who did what.