I have an idea .... for Live Docs +

Live docs are good but there’s a missing opportunity to make them much more useful. That opportunity is hanging in there to be grabbed.

I can imagine a scenario where live docs functions as a ‘working’ environment for the underlying page.

Let me explain.

Assume that you have an HR page that lists employee benefits. You need to update that page.

Obviusly, you don’t want employees to see the updates being made. So you restrict the page access.

But now your good folks can’t access the page at all. You lock them out of the good, still perfectly valid, content.

Now imagine that you convert that benefits page to a live doc and two things happen:

• users with View only access would see the last pre-conversion page ‘version’

• users with edit rights would be able to see and edit the Live doc.

Updating pages may take days or weeks, especially for HR/finances/legal content. And for product documentation. There are iterations, approvals, etc. It’s a part of the process.

Currently, users get around this by creating new temporary pages, working in Google docs, using space sync apps… or page restrictions.

Giving Live Docs the ability to function as a temporary collaborative draft would solve:

• access to existing content while the new content is being prepared (on the page level)

• Live Docs compatibility issues for many marketplace apps - as they could take advantage of that ‘last published/updated’ version.

Unless I’m very much mistaken, it’s all there - it’s just a question of connecting the dots.

P.S. I hope I can take turn this into a regular feature. Tinker, tailor, soldier… hype.