Collaboration

Several people can edit the same document draft at the same time in Alchex. You see who else is in the document, their cursors move as they type, and everyone's changes land in the one live draft. Use this when a policy or procedure is being written by more than one person, or when you want a colleague to fix a section while you keep working elsewhere.

Who can join

Joining the live editing session needs the Writer or Owner role on the document's team; a workspace Owner or Admin counts as team Owner everywhere. A Reader is refused the live session and sees the document read-only instead. Collaboration is per document draft, so a person's access follows the team the document belongs to — see Permissions and Drafts.

Presence and cursors

Open Governance → a document → Document and the header shows who is in the draft with you.

Presence counts people, not connections: a colleague with two tabs open appears once. Each person gets a colour, and their cursor and selection appear in that colour inside the text as they work.

How simultaneous edits merge

Edits merge automatically. Two people typing in different paragraphs both keep their text. Two people typing in the same paragraph both keep their text, interleaved at the character level — the result is a merge, not a last-writer-wins overwrite, and nobody's work is dropped. There is no lock, no check-out, and no "someone else is editing" block.

There is also no Save button and no save conflict. Everything you type is part of the shared draft as you type it, which is why you should agree with your co-editors on who is rewriting what — Alchex will faithfully merge two people rewriting the same sentence into one sentence neither of them wrote.

Comments are separate from the text and are not merged into it; see Comments.

When the connection drops

If your connection drops, the editor stays open and a Reconnecting… ribbon appears, saying your edits are safe and will sync when the connection returns. Keep typing. Your edits buffer in your browser and are sent as soon as the connection is back — they survive a closed tab too.

Two things end the session rather than reconnect it:

• The draft publishes. Everyone's editor moves to the new draft session, seeded from the version that just published.
• The room is closed or your access is revoked. The editor stops accepting changes.

If you had unsynced local edits when the draft moved on, they are not merged into the new draft. You get a recovery banner instead, with View, Copy and Discard. That path — and the fact that Discard is irreversible — is covered in Drafts.

When live editing is unavailable

If the collaboration service cannot be reached, Alchex does not pretend to be live. The document renders read-only with the message that live editing is unavailable right now and that you are seeing the latest saved version. You can still read the document, its history and its comments; you cannot type. Reload once the service is back.

The same read-only render appears for an archived document, which stays read-only until it is restored — see Activity and archive.

Limits worth knowing

• Only one draft exists per document, so there is no way to co-edit two competing versions of the same document in parallel.
• Once a draft is submitted for review it is sealed, and the live session becomes read-only for everyone at the same moment. Withdraw or reject the review to reopen it.
• The AI applies its edits to the same live draft, so a change it makes appears in your editor while you are in it. See AI review.