Revision History now available with Real-time Collaboration in CKEditor 5
The break of the decade brought what can easily be assumed a revolution in the way we approach work in certain areas. What used to be perceived as the domain of freelancers, programmers, and maybe journalists – remote work – turned out to be the way of employment for more people than we could imagine. The unprecedented outburst of collaboration tools and technologies, enabling people from all over the world to come together as one, via the magic of the internet, has changed the way we now think about teams, colleagues, and cooperation as a whole. It has especially been the case in the creative area, one that we cherish and cover in CKSource, struggling to bring our users the best WYSIWYG editor in history. Being an integral part of many collaborative and remote communication solutions, we have gained considerable knowledge on what works well and what kind of software people really need.
# Two killer features come together
For a long time, the Real-time Collaboration feature served our users in the best way possible. It did this, by allowing them to comment and edit content together in a rapid development environment. The same goes for Revision History – a versioning tool that became a user favorite from day one. Now we are bringing both of these great features together in one package!
Try demo nowWhat does this mean for our users one may ask? First of all, we bring together these two highly-valued features in a seamless way. So far the editors had to choose between real-time collaboration and the ability to utilize all of the benefits that document versioning brings. When we decided to pair these two features, we ended up delivering an out-of-the-box, industry-standard solution comparable with what the market giants like Google offer. CKEditor 5 provides a fast, intuitive editing environment that has just become more intuitive and dynamic while addressing a far greater number of editing needs at the same time!
Bundling these features is beneficial for users also in the context of cost. Delivering an in-house, custom-made solution would be very time-consuming, costly, and a real hell in keeping it all updated. It would also be difficult making it compatible with regular developmental changes of CKEditor 5. The ability to order a ready-made software package that can address those two features seemed distant to achieve. It is very much needed in addressing client needs and is also an easy-to-implement and affordable offer to take advantage of.
# A quick look at Revision History
Revision History is a new premium plugin which you can purchase for an additional cost. This document versioning tool is used more often than we could probably think of in the first place. After all, even software releases use versioning to track the progress of new things or features added and ones taken away.
Word processors, both standalone and online ones, content management systems, enterprises, such as Wikipedia, rely on tracking versions. Companies that work in the legal and banking fields, as well as insurance firms, need to keep tight track of all changes made to their documents as well as who introduced these changes. Finally, pharmaceutical companies and producers of medicine can also take advantage of version control to be able to audit trails.
The Revision History feature allows CKEditor 5 users to create and view versions of the content they are working on in chronological order. These versions or revisions can be named and dated during the creation of the document. This allows the editor to clearly mark both the purpose and the time of the revision they are saving.
These versions are easily accessible from a side panel and can be displayed and compared against older versions. A preview mode is also available that allows for easy viewing of content that was developed over time. It also comes with close inspection of the moment the changes were made, why were they made, and who made them. You can also review content changes as well as suggestions made with the Track Changes feature.
We have prepared a dedicated blog post that compares Revision History with Track Changes and points out similarities and differences between these two features.
Until now, the Revision History feature has only been available for non-real-time collaboration usage due to certain technical limitations. However, as progress is inevitable in the face of challenges, this state of affairs has been changed with the latest release of CKEditor 5. Our own versioning tool is now available for real-time collaboration just as it has been for non-real time collaboration.
# A quick look at Real-time Collaboration
More often than not in our trying times, writing is a team sport. And some teams simply prefer to play using the on-the-go approach. The modern business and technical environments are especially ones where cooperative writing is widespread. Quite often – such as in trade deals – it is a matter of cooperation on a company level and does not just involve individual just users.
The battle-hardened Real-time Collaboration features have been tried and updated multiple times in the past years. This package makes simultaneous writing possible with automated conflict resolution and real-time content updates.
No more problems with several versions of the same document. No more dealing with the hassle of having to resolve conflicts and introduce new changes. Everything works smoothly and securely out of the box – even if some of the participants might wish that internet providers lived up to their promises related to connection speed, stability, and availability!
So far we have coupled Real-time Collaboration with Track Changes and Comments, as well as the added benefit of having users selection and presence list. It is flexible, customizable, adaptive, and powerful thanks to the atomic design approach.
These scalable tools have helped our users navigate the underwater reefs and currents of switching to digital. online cooperation can be difficult at times, and these features are a great fit for it as a whole and in order to implement a plethora of implementations and business areas.
We are now happy to announce we have added the Revision History to this amazing roster, enhancing the way online collaboration can provide solutions with users working in a synchronous fashion.
You can try out the revision history with real-time collaboration demo live on our site.
# Employ the power of Revision History in your own collaborative environment!
If you create documents that need the highest level of control on every stage of creation; if you need to carefully track progress in a multi-user environment; or if you simply want to work in real-time on your contents – then this is an offer to satisfy all of the needs you and your company may have.
Check out the 30-day obligation-free Premium features free trial or contact us at once!
