[1][better source needed] It allowed real-time editing of a single document by multiple users over a LAN and relied on a workgroup server.
Interest in real-time collaborative editing over the internet led to the development of MoonEdit and SubEthaEdit in the 2003-2005 time frame, followed soon after by Gobby.
It provided simultaneous edits on the entirety of a document, though changes from other users were only reflected after the client program polling the server (every half-minute or so).
Google Sites was launched in February 2007 as a refactoring of JotSpot,[3][4][5][6] but it lacks the multi-user real-time abilities of JotLive.
However, Google announced in August 2010 on its blog[7] that it had decided to stop developing Wave as a standalone project, due to insufficient user adoption.
[8] 2020 has seen a surge of interest in the concept, as Microsoft also recently released its Fluid Framework, which relies on a novel Total Order Broadcast technology, as opposed to OT or CRDT.
It enables collaborative real-time editing of word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawing and vector graphics.
Real-time collaborative editing can also occur in hybrid manner, such as with Power Sheet BI for Excel,[16] in offline, web-based, and online collaborative editing in desktop software as well as web-based and mobile apps, which can be synchronized automatically with instant access to version history.
2020 has seen a resurgence of interest in embedding these applications into secure web applications, particularly for business use-cases, with Microsoft and Vaadin taking the lead with specialized real-time collaboration backends that handle the complexities of real-time synchronous data sharing, which developers can utilize through APIs.
[17][18] Mozilla released in 2013 the javascript library TogetherJS, which adds real-time collaborative editing to any web application via a messaging system and optionally an operational transform algorithm for forms synchronization.
[19] Vaadin Ltd., the vendor of the Vaadin platform, released V1.0 of their Collaboration Engine In October 2020,[20] with the premise of allowing developers to rapidly build real-time collaboration and editing features in to any web application with Java backends using a few lines of codes (for specific use-cases through their, still limited, high-level APIs).
[24] Although marketed as real-time collaboration, these 'workspace' approaches require either document locking (so only one person can edit it at a time), or 'reconciliation' of conflicting changes, which is generally found by users to be unsatisfactory.