Is it possible to collaborate on a blog?

[Francis Jones]

Specifically, can 2 or more users edit the content of a blog before it is posted.

[Stephen Deutsch]

Hi Francis,

Currently it is not possible to edit a page/blog at the exact same time (i.e. see changes in realtime).  However, this is on the roadmap for Confluence. See here: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-8333

[Francis Jones]

It doesn't even have to be in real time. It should just be that 2 or more users can work on an unsaved/unpublished page or blog draft together.

[no_longer_in_sudoers_file]

@Francis Jones,

Here's how we use Confluence to collaborate between myself and the two teams I'm on at Atlassian...

I am an embedded Site Reliability Engineer for the CST team.  That means I also am a part of the SRE team.  This is a great example of how Confluence and Hipchat allow me to work with a distributed team.  CST has people in Europe, San Francisco and Austin.  SRE has people distributed globally.  All of us are in different timezones and have different schedules.

For real-time collaboration, we use Hipchat for its instant messaging functionality.  But when you have people asleep during your work hours, Hipchat becomes a less appropriate tool, although I love having the timestamps of when I said something and what I said.  You'll often find that I copy-paste my Hipchat conversations into JIRA tickets or Confluence pages.

Confluence takes documentation to a whole new level.  Recently I proposed some infrastructure changes from the Austin office.  That night, Platform and Network Engineers in Sydney commented (inline) on my proposal to identify missing information, ask questions and otherwise markup my document.  The next day I was able to go through those inline comments and either ask further questions as comment-replies to the inline comments or simply edit my document and then click the "resolve" link to resolve their point.  Since we receive email notifications about updates, comments, etc., this means I know what is happening to my proposal document at any given time.  I have a tracked version history.  I am able to quickly iterate from concept to proposal and final document within a short period of time, leveraging the specialized knowledge of a very talented group of people I've never even met in person from any level of the company.

I'm sure there are more things we could do to collaborate in new ways and I'd love to know what collaboration means to you.   Hopefully this helps.

--Sam

[Francis Jones]

I want to know if it's at all possible for two users to collaborate inside Confluence on the content of a blog post before it is published?

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist]]

Depends on what you mean by collaborate. You can add comments and engage in discussions on a blog.

[Francis Jones]

I meant create the blog content in tandem in the editor.

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist]]

You mean editing a blog created by another? Or creating a blog together?

[Francis Jones]

Well, a blog has to be created by a single user. But there does not seem to be a way for 2 or more users to collaborate on a blog (ie writing it) before it is posted.