Real-Time Collaboration and Presence

Editing together, live

StretchDocs supports real-time collaboration: several people can open and edit the same document at the same time, the way you would in Google Docs. You see who else is present, and edits flow between collaborators through the suite's shared real-time service.

Presence — who's in the room

Presence shows the live roster of people currently in a document. Each participant appears with:

• A display name so you know who it is.
• A color that identifies their cursor and highlights.
• A cursor position indicating where in the document they're working.

Presence is live and self-cleaning: a participant who goes idle or closes the document is removed automatically after a short inactivity window (about 45 seconds), so the roster reflects who is actually there right now, not who was there earlier.

Join a live session

1. Open the document from the library.
2. StretchDocs registers your presence in the document's room and requests a short-lived real-time token that connects you to the shared collaboration service.
3. You'll see the avatars or names of anyone else currently in the document.
4. Start editing — your cursor and changes are shared with the others in real time.

You don't manage tokens or connections yourself; StretchDocs mints the real-time token for the document behind the scenes when you open it.

Coordinating an editing session

• Watch cursors. Presence cursors show where teammates are working so you can avoid editing the same sentence at once.
• Talk in comments. For anything that needs a decision, drop a comment anchored to the text rather than editing over someone's work.
• Use suggestions for changes you're unsure about. A suggestion proposes a change the author can accept or reject, which is safer than overwriting during a live session.

A realistic example

Three people prep a client proposal 20 minutes before a call. The lead opens the document; the designer and account manager join. Each sees the others' colored cursors. The account manager fixes pricing in the summary while the designer tightens the intro — their cursors are in different sections, so there's no collision. The lead notices a claim that needs sign-off and leaves a comment instead of editing it. When the designer steps away for a few minutes, her presence drops off the roster automatically.

Tips

• Divide by section. Agree who's working where, and let presence cursors keep you honest.
• Prefer comments and suggestions over silent overwrites when several people are live.
• If a teammate's cursor lingers unmoved, they may have stepped away — presence will clear them shortly.
• Take a snapshot before a big collaborative session so you have a clean pre-session restore point.

Troubleshooting

I don't see anyone else even though a teammate is editing. Presence updates continuously; give it a moment and reload. Confirm you're both in the same document (same title and organization).

A teammate disappeared from the roster. Presence auto-expires after roughly 45 seconds of inactivity. They'll reappear as soon as they interact again.

"Unable to mint realtime room token." The real-time connection couldn't be established. Reload the document; if it persists, the shared real-time service may be briefly unavailable — you can keep editing and saving normally in the meantime.

Two of us edited the same line and one change was lost. Live editing merges changes, but simultaneous edits to the exact same text can conflict. Use presence cursors to stay out of each other's sentences, and lean on suggestions for contested edits.