Teamrooms & Conflicts

HCL Domino Domino Forum
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Hi everyone,

We are running into problems with Teamrooms:

We have documents posted in a Teamroom, which are marked for review by several different people. If two people edit the doc simultaneously, we get replication or save conflicts. This seems to contridict the ‘collaborative’ features that we use the Teamroom for.

  1. Is there some way to force only one updater at a time?

  2. Why is there no notification that the doc is already open for editing?

  3. Is there anyway to merge the attached Word doc after a conflict occurs?

These seem like pretty fundamental features in a multi-user application like this…

Any help is appreciated!

Dan

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Subject: Teamrooms & Conflicts

In general it is better for busy people to do things when they can, even if this sometimes causes conflict documents that have to be sorted out later. Locking people out simplifies the admin, but often at the expense of the team’s overall productivity.Attached files are another matter, because they can bypass Notes’ conflict detection. At least with Notes documents you know when a conflict has occurred. With attached files a conflict can go unnoticed, and that can be far more damaging to the team’s work.

Embedded objects are better, because they can be edited in the context of a Notes document edit. This tends to protect the conflict mechanism.

For complex data, it may be better to use a custom application based on a document library to split the content into many Notes documents that can each be edited separately by one author at a time. Or it may be better to assign an editor to own the document and assemble contributions from other team members.

In any case, there is an element of user education required. Users need to understand that the TeamRoom is a shared resource. Any complex edit should be prepared offline – in a personal journal, for example – so that the shared document is open for only a short time as the new text is copied and pasted in.

No, there is no magic way to merge edits that always gets it right.

  1. No, not with attached files. With Notes documents you would have to forbid replicas.

  2. Notes does not know that you are using Word to edit the copy of the file that you detached last month.

  3. Manually. A computer program cannot understand how two edits have changed the meaning in different ways. A program can merge edits at a paragraph, sentence or word level, but the meaning of the result is sometimes completely wrong.

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Subject: RE: Teamrooms & Conflicts

Thanks Rod,

I understand what you’re saying, but I can’t help but think that this puts a big damper on the ‘collaborative’ nature of Notes…it’s designed to be a multi-user app, but it can’t handle two users accessing the same doc simultaneously?

Note that the users are not detatching and re-attaching the file. They are editing the file directly from the Teamroom document - so, the Teamroom should certainly know that the given file is open for editing by someone else at that time.

Anyway, thanks for the tips…

If there was an option to prevent 2 users from ‘editing’ the attachment simultaneously, I would still be interested in that. It saves the aftermath cleanup of manually merging the files later.

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Subject: RE: Teamrooms & Conflicts

Yes, direct editing of the attachment ensures that conflicts are flagged. TeamRoom could be modified to implement document locking.

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Subject: RE: Teamrooms & Conflicts

Thanks Rod, I’m going to try this option and see how it goes (it’s a small user group for this teamroom, anyway…)

Dan