Collaborating with Visio 2013

New and improved collaboration features in Visio 2013 will allow teams to work together more efficiently. Coauthoring using Visio Professional 2013 or Visio Pro for Office 365 allows multiple users to work on the same document and see changes made by others almost as soon as they occur. New commenting features allow comments to be assigned to particular shapes and threaded into conversations. The improved collaboration tools can help teams working on network designs or describing business processes to offsite clients. However, the features require diagrams to be stored in the new Visio 2013 file format on SharePoint Server 2013, SharePoint Online, or SkyDrive.

Coauthoring Is New

Coauthoring allows multiple people to see and modify a Visio drawing (a collection of pages or sheets) at the same time, which may allow a team to complete a drawing faster. All users see the shapes being edited in near real time. When one user edits a shape, the other users are notified immediately that the shape is being edited, but they don’t see the specific changes until the editing user saves the diagram. When one user saves the file, other coauthors get an “Updates Available” notification that the file has changed and they should immediately reload it before continuing. Changed shapes then appear. (See the illustration “Visio 2013 Collaboration Features“.)