Indication about description being updated in real-time when collaborating on the same document

The “description” field of a task doesn’t allow multiple persons to edit it at the same time. It’s not a collaborative-friendly tool. Therefore, what happens when multiple people work on the same task at the same time, they end up overwriting the description (last edit wins)

The “best” way to handle that, is to change the behaviour and make the description field “collaborative-friendly” by detecting conflicts and managing them (there are several ways to do that, but I won’t go into technicals atm)

Another (simpler) way, would be to show an indicator that makes it obvious that someone (and, ideally, whom) is currently editing the document. That would help people avoid overwriting someone else’s description.

Such indicator would be quite useful, and is a simple yet effective way of avoiding such conflicts.

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There is indeed nothing in Asana about collaborative work on the same object. That is technically pretty hard to do though.

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It depends how it’s done, it’s not necessarily that hard and would be limited to the “description” field. I implemented such a system when working on a collaborative Authoring tool, where teachers would collaborate on the same document to write their courses. It’s definitely not an easy task, but not necessarily overcomplicated either.

But, the current proposal isn’t to make it collaborative (it would be better IMHO, as Asana is meant to be collaborative in the first place), but simply to let know other people who may be working on the same description that the description is being updated by a teammate, to avoid loss of work.

That uses similar technologies (websockets) but is less complicated because it doesn’t try to detect/resolve conflicts, but rather help to avoid them.

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Is there any update on this topic?
Would love to see a transparent way of handling simultaneously collaborating on task descriptions.

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When there are updates, Asana comes back and post here. We haven’t heard of anything (yet).

Hi, wouldn’t it be possible just to implement the “dancing three dots”? Like what we see in chat or message apps, etc.? Dropbox has this live feature, it cannot possibly be so complicated… or?

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I agree it would be great to have the ability to collaborate in a task’s description box similar to Google docs or shared Word docs. I’ve been finding myself working on call notes in a task to track discussions and other members of my team will want to add/edit at the same time so it would be useful to have that collaboration ability.

I know it could be done via comments as well but that defeats the “collaboration” effort since it would silo each of the responses rather than create one all encompassing description.

I just ran into this problem today. I wanted to use an Asana task for meeting notes, but when me and the other attendees typed at the same time it deleted one person’s notes. I really want to keep my workflow in Asana if possible and avoid having to have Asana and a google doc open in a meeting, but the way people typing at the same time results in losing information is a problem.

We decided to each have our own task for each meeting and take notes there. Until a better solution arises.

@Bastien_Siebman thanks for the tip. If you each have your own task for notes, what do you reference during the meeting as an Agenda?

The agenda should always be in the parent task.