What are the best use cases for Live Docs?

[Matthew Burfeind]

I've been reading about Live Docs, which are not yet available on my site or my sandbox, and I've been struggling to find a good use case for them. I was concerned that there would be no history, but they do seem to retain some sort of version control, although I'm not clear how that works. Is it really the case that the only difference between Live Docs and Pages is that pages need the extra steps of Editing and Publishing, while Live Docs need the extra step of "Switch to Viewing" if you want to ensure you don't change content by accident? I'm really not sure what value this adds, so I'd love to hear from some folks who find them useful.

[Shawn Doyle - ReleaseTEAM · Accepted solution]

Hi @Matthew Burfeind 

Some people don't like to have to hit the edit and publish buttons.  That is pretty much it :)

Actually it's the ability to real time collaborate with others that makes live docs attractive.  Google docs has had it for some time, and while I was at first skeptical, I've found it to be useful.

[Matthew Burfeind]

Except Pages have supported real-time collaboration for some time now. We use that functionality a lot, so that's not really a selling point for me, unless it really is that you can now do it without having to hit the edit and publish buttons. Maybe the intended workflow is that you start a collaborative doc as a Live Doc and then when it's done you turn it into a Page and lock it down? Seems like that's more confusing than  actually helpful. 

[Shawn Doyle - ReleaseTEAM]

I agree.

[Dustin Smith · Accepted solution]

Hi @Matthew Burfeind 👋

This is a great question and @Shawn Doyle - ReleaseTEAM pretty much nails it. To add some more background - for a while now we've had customers who have adopted Confluence for super collaborative activities like meeting notes, brain storms, group reviews, etc. Having multiple people in separate draft modes and then having to publish changes over the top of each other was a pain and slowed down the process.  We thought about just wrapping the live docs functionality into the page edit capability, but during testing got really strong feedback that customers liked the existing page capability of single author, publish, hyper granular versioning, etc. for their existing knowledge management, wiki, training, documentation use cases and didn't want that changed. 

In the end we decided to offer the best of both worlds by letting customers decide if a live doc or a page best suited their workflow - and then make it super easy to switch between the two at any time. 

If you're curious to learn more - myself and @David Michelson are actually doing a live docs webinar next week on 7/23. Even if you can't attend live - that link will take you to the recording afterwards. 👍

[Matthew Burfeind]

Thanks, that actually clears things up for me significantly. I've just registered for the webinar next week.

Much appreciated.