Posted on: 09-11-2021

Content collaboration best practices

Thinking about ways of effective collaboration - and content collaboration in particular - is something that gives people in the corporate world, especially in the high-tech area, some sleepless nights. No wonder - collaborative efforts can increase the team’s productivity greatly, facilitate the workflow, and tip the scales as far as the organization’s financial results or growth are concerned. In brief, great collaboration often shapes the entity’s bright future - paving the way for innovativeness and overall success.

But why is content collaboration so crucial in doing business? Well, despite the captivating stereotype, a successful creative process is, very often, not a matter of lone wolves but of whole teams going hand in hand. And collaboration, being the lifeblood of progressive organizations, can simply give them a competitive advantage in the race for greater productivity.

And if we’re looking at content that is truly compelling and captivating - in both its visual and text aspects - it has most likely been created as a result of a collaborative effort and proper content management. But it’s not just people that matter when modern content collaboration is concerned. What’s also crucial are cutting-edge tools and software as well as content collaboration best practices.

# Why collaboration matters so much

These days, file sharing is not enough for a progressive organization to thrive and adapt to the fast pace of doing business. There’s much more at stake in today’s competitive environment. And it is called content collaboration - a powerful, cutting-edge solution that can also be regarded as a versatile marketing tool.

With all that said, you still may ask yourselves: what is content collaboration, then? In brief, it’s all about using, sharing, and distributing content, and working together to edit it by at least two people - simultaneously or asynchronously. What’s important is that this collaboration process, or completing a project that involves content production, more and more often takes place in a remote environment.

Usually, organization leaders or managers start to think about improving collaborative processes as their entities scale and more and more employees are let in. But the thing is, that seamless collaboration is crucial from day one as it can make or break the company’s success or even existence.

And great achievers of the tech world know the importance of working together perfectly well. For these reasons, effective collaboration approaches, such as team collaboration, cloud collaboration, video collaboration, internal and external collaboration as well as a strategic alliance have been on the rise, recently. Also, Agile project management, is more and more appreciated, not only by IT teams, and those who rely on this approach can’t say enough about it. But what are the benefits of content collaboration, in detail? Read on to find out.

# Advantages of modern content collaboration

The list of benefits of content collaboration is truly impressive. Among the advantages of this solution, we may find perfecting the content and making it more clear, understandable, and mistakes-free - thanks to the opportunity of looking at it from different angles by numerous contributors. Moreover, due to the collaboration of people from various backgrounds, we may align the message perfectly to particular target audiences and reach them easier.

Apart from getting the superb quality of the copy, content collaboration, the modern way, also helps get things that need editing (and there are a lot of them within any organization) smoother and faster. There are more people in the mix, so the workflow is divided, and each person can focus on what they do best.

What’s also important is that people across various divisions, or departments, can provide their unique contribution (experiences, points of view, ideas) to a project, enriching it and giving it the best shape possible. Both regular employees and decision-makers within an organization can cooperate hand in hand to leave their trace, no matter their tight schedules or current locations.

Remember that no person has profound expertise in all areas. Some people are specialized in narrow fields, while others have vast general knowledge or just huge experience in one subject or another. And there are the professional editors or proofreaders organizations who care about high quality of content and their public image simply cannot go without. A first-class content collaboration approach gathers them all, and allows everyone to speak out and be heard.

Without any doubt, online content collaboration is a great solution for the remote-first culture of today and it perfectly fits into the post-COVID era where teams are much more geographically dispersed than ever before. Actually, this is the only reasonable solution for the current time, perfect for modern cross-cultural teams, often working across different time zones, and geographical areas. Their members can get down to work from any place in the world - all they need is access to the Internet.

# The most effective content collaboration practices

But to be able to make use of all those benefits, one needs to choose wisely and pick up only those content collaboration practices that are the most effective for a given case. To collaborate effectively, you simply need to have the right tools at your fingertips - which will enable you to exchange ideas quickly and efficiently - from the very beginning of the process to further stages, such as revising the text or proofreading it. These practices include:

Finding the right space that can make the content collaboration process smoother and fully undisturbed. As for the times we live in, a remote workspace seems to be the best option wherein the workflow is the most effective.
Providing appropriate project management practices, e.g. by breaking down the project into smaller parts, and gathering high-class specialists representing various fields (graphic designers, SEO specialists, editors, proofreaders) to work on the project within their fields of expertise.
Using versatile tools that are proper not only for editing documents but also enhancing them with visually attractive elements, such as tables, lists, videos, gifs, or infographics. Collaboration can involve those elements, resulting in things like blog posts, case studies, eBooks, presentations, and many other complex materials being designed the best way possible.
Allowing time and space for providing feedback, the core of collaboration, so that the workflow goes smoothly. Coordinating the whole process efficiently and communication threading are also crucial.
Finding a proper - powerful and versatile - content collaboration tool to handle all of those processes and activities effectively. This tool should offer as many collaboration (including real-time one) modes as possible, and also enable the tracking of progress at a glance. It needs to be easy-to-use, with a clear design, and a very short learning curve.
Staying alert and always checking on what’s new in the market in terms of content collaboration tools and features, and only choosing the content collaboration software that adapts to the ever-changing reality, market conditions, and users’ needs. It should provide them with cutting-edge, ultramodern, and extremely advanced features and solutions, setting standards for the whole industry.

And the latter from the list above is definitely the case of the legendary - ultramodern, flexible, and versatile - CKEditor 5, which helps thousands of its users to bring the content collaboration process, and its results, to a whole new level.

# Top-tier content collaboration tools and software: CKEditor 5

CKEditor 5 perfectly replaces old-time content creation solutions such as a mixture of using emails (and sending documents back and forth for making corrections and gathering the input of various contributors), phone calls, and hand-written notes made during live meetings. Those obsolete methods are inefficient and extremely time-consuming. No wonder that, on the threshold of the 21st century, more effective software and tools had to be developed.

And CKEditor 5 is one of the leaders in this innovative group. It enables content creation in the most cutting-edge way, offering many state-of-the-art methods for achieving great results fast. Simple, but on the other hand - increasingly laborious, editing has been replaced by very advanced practices, and this upgraded the content creation process greatly.

As for CKEditor 5, it’s all available within one single application, and users don’t need to leave it for any third-party vendors. This way, the whole content creation process takes place in one document, without the need of switching between external applications and copy-pasting content from various sources.

With its hallmarks, such as real-time collaboration, revision history, comments, and track changes features, CKEditor 5 is the right content collaboration solution for many use cases, problems, and challenges organizations may face. It is utilized by online content collaboration platforms of various types as well as Document Management, CMS and CRM systems, to name but a few examples of its integrations.

CKEditor 5 gives its users an unrivaled level of control - over the contributors’ input, changes made, and the workflow in general. In short, we can trace within seconds who wrote what and when when using it. Also, we can track what were the other team members’ reactions to content created, and come back to previous versions of the edited material at any time.

What’s important, is that with CKEditor 5, the number of connected collaborators is not limited, and user presence list is available at any time.

But there’s much more to the CKEditor 5’s first-class content collaboration features category. Recently, it has been enhanced with a few very interesting functionalities that make collaborative content production or document collaboration even more fruitful and seamless. And new cutting-edge features are being added regularly.

What has been introduced lately, is the intriguing v29.1.0 release. It encompasses a wide range of useful features, such as the new revolutionary navigation tool - the unique content minimap, improved find and replace feature as well as the enhanced revision history option. The latter is a smart versioning tool (or an advanced document version history system), enriched with functionalities such as the autosave feature.

The content collaboration process, as well as the reader experience, can also be enriched with the CKEditor 5 media embed feature that enables embedding videos, social media snippets, Spotify listings, and more. By easily installing CKEditor 5, e.g. within an online content collaboration platform, we get a content collaboration tool ready to meet the needs of today and face any challenges of tomorrow.

If you, too, want to enhance content collaboration practices within your organization, don’t hesitate to try our real-time collaboration demo or contact us now!

You can read more on the topic of collaboration in our blog posts:

Content collaboration best practices

# Why collaboration matters so much

# Advantages of modern content collaboration

# The most effective content collaboration practices

# Top-tier content collaboration tools and software: CKEditor 5

Subscribe to our newsletter