Concurrent Editing and Merging Changes

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This page covers the concurrent editing behavior in Confluence 6.0 or later when your administrator has chosen to disable collaborative editing

In most cases, this won't apply to your Confluence site.

 

Sometimes, another user may edit the same page as you're editing, at the same time you do. When this happens, Confluence will do its best to ensure nobody's changes are lost.

How will I know if someone else is editing the same page as I am?

If another user is editing the same page as you, Confluence will display a message above your edit screen letting you know who the other user is and when the last edit was made.

Screenshot: Concurrent editing notification



What happens if two of us are editing the same page and the other user saves before I do?

If someone else has saved the page before you, when you click Save, Confluence will check if there are any conflicts between your changes and theirs. If there are no conflicting changes, Confluence will merge the changes.

If there are conflicts, Confluence will display them for you and give you the option to:

  • Continue editing - Continue to edit the page; useful if you want to manually merge the changes.  
  • Overwrite - Replace the other person's edits with yours (their edits will not be included in the latest version). 
  • Cancel - Discard your changes and exit the editor, keeping the other person's edits. 

Example Scenario

For example, Alice and Bob both edit the same page at the same time.

If Alice clicks save before Bob, Bob is now effectively editing an out-of-date version of the page. When Bob clicks save, Confluence will examine his changes to see if any overlap with Alice's. If the changes don't overlap (i.e. Alice and Bob edited different parts of the page), Bob's changes will be merged with Alice's automatically.

If Bob's changes overlap with Alice's, Confluence will display an error message to Bob showing where Alice has changed the page, and giving Bob the options to overwrite Alice's changes with his own, to re-edit the document to incorporate Alice's work, or to cancel his own changes entirely, maintaining Alice's changes.

Last modified on Nov 24, 2021

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