Announcing public preview of coauthoring in Modern app designer
We are happy to announce that Coauthoring is now available in most of the regions allowing fusion teams to build better apps faster. With coauthoring you can see who is working on the same app at the same time, and you can see their applied changes in real-time. You don’t need to worry anymore about your changes, because coauthoring helps you avoid the unintentional overwrite of each other’s changes. You always work on the latest version of the app. Together.
This feature joins Office-like comments to create a place where people can work together effectively and effortlessly.
How can I try coauthoring?
In order to try coauthoring, you need to enable it for your organization. Go to the Power Platform admin center and choose “Enable coauthoring” under the Features. See more in our documentation.
Then open Modern app designer, choose model-driven apps and invite other makers from your organization to work on the app together. You can add and remove pages, change app properties, reorder pages etc and see all these changes in real-time. When somebody adds a new page or a dashboard, you’ll see a sparkle.
How does coauthoring change the way we work?
Being able to collaborate in real-time opens doors to many possibilities. Our customers have shared the following cases on how they plan to use coauthoring.
- Divide and conquer to share the workload
Before coauthoring, there hasn’t been an effective way for multiple makers to work together on the same app. You would need to distribute working hours to make sure that you don’t overwrite each other’s changes. With coauthoring, multiple makers can see who else is present in the app, see in the left navigation bar what parts of the app other makers are working on, and see the changes in the app in real-time. Makers can add new pages and work on them without disturbing other makers’ work.
- Pro and citizen developers working together
Before coauthoring, the handout of the projects had to happen during the meetings as a written note or a sketched design. With coauthoring, you have a fully hands-on experience with every member of your team working together where the work is happening. You can tag each other in comments for asynchronous communication, or everyone – pro developers, operations, marketing, citizen developers – can open an app, and watch each other making changes together in the real-time (while maybe being on a call at the same time). The difference is that it’s not one person sharing the screen, it’s everyone seeing the same version of the app and being able to add/edit/remove app components without disturbing the work of other makers.
- Teaching new makers about Power Apps in the tools where they work
We’ve heard from many customers that they want to use coauthoring to help new makers grow within the organization. With coauthoring, the fresh makers can shadow the pro maker and watch them building an app and/or complete the tasks that pro maker has set up for them. If you have a cohort of new developers who you introduce Power Apps to, you can start one project and have people present in the app and shadow to learn.
What if I want to learn more or have feedback?
We are excited for you to try coauthoring and share with us what other situations it’s useful in! Power Apps is continuing to invest in better collaboration for all makers to help build apps faster than ever.
Read more about coauthoring capabilities in our documentation here or read about all collaboration features for Power Apps here.
Coauthoring was built with Microsoft’s own open source Fluid Framework and Azure Fluid Relay, which recently became generally available.
