Improving Collaborative Editing

While many of our customers have used collaborative editing, there’s certainly one aspect that could be improved; we’re seeing a lot of pending invitations to editing sessions, that apparently do not reach the intended recipient.

When a session owner invites somebody else to the collaborative editing session, it isn’t really clearly indicated to the invitee unless he or she is logged in at the moment, and paying attention to notifications. As such, it seems the invitation gets lost all too often — the invitee is either not online or not paying attention.

While the session is listed in the File Cloud application, it just doesn’t seem like a good place to expect users to go. While the iconography for the file being edited in question is also annotated, who browses all their files looking for such an icon?

A better notification system may also send out an email to the invitee — something that’s almost guaranteed to be read at some point in the future, but perhaps not immediately.