SharePoint 2010 - Can two or more people edit a file at the same time?

Question

I have a SharePoint 2010 site with a document library for storing Excel files. If someone is editing an Excel file (using stand-alone Excel, not Excel services), everyone else will be forced to open the file read-only until the first person is done editing. Is there a way around this? What I want is to allow two or more people to be able to edit the file at the same time. Also, I don't want people to overwrite each other. Instead, I'd like SharePoint to merge their changes. Is this possible in SharePoint 2010?

Answer 1

You can't do this automatically with SharePoint or anything else - think about what you're asking the computer to do.

What happens when two people edit the same cell. Which one should be kept? Only a human can decide that. Conflict resolution.

Answer 2

Unfortunately, the file must be locked for updates unless you're using Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 together. This means that only one user per time can edit a file. The locking and version tracking capabilities of SharePoint are excellent, and this makes it a great tool for the type of collaboration you're talking about, but you would have to split documents into multiple files in order to extend the amount that could be edited at a time. For instance, we sometimes unmerge documents into technical, requirements, and financials sections so that the 3 experts required for the review can work concurrently. We then merge when everyone is finished.

Answer 3

The new version of SharePoint and Office (SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010) respectively are supposed to allow for this. This also includes the web based versions. I have seen Word and Excel in action do this, not sure about other client applications.

I am not sure about the specific implementation features you are asking about in terms of security though. Sorry.,=

Here is a discussion

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sharepoint/archive/2009/10/19/sharepoint-2010.aspx

Answer 4

Yes you can. I've used it with Word and PowerPoint. You will need Office 2010 client apps and SharePoint 2010 foundation at least. You must also allow editing without checking out on the document library.

It's quite cool, you can mark regions as 'locked' so no-one can change them and you can see what other people have changed every time you save your changes to the server. You also get to see who's working on the document from the Office app. The merging happens on SharePoint 2010.