Introducing Coauthoring for SharePoint Pages and News

Really good function, will make things so much easier. My only criticism is there is now no discard option. I often go into edit mode to check that the correct headings have been used and alt text is in place and lots of other bits and bobs for our editors, this means that we will have a lot of new versions where no editing has been done (and I will show as the last modifier), and I know editors will forget to republish pages if they know they have made no edits

Melito In my organization, we often need to go into a page to understand how it was built -- check headings, alternative text, etc. There's not a simple way to do that other than checking the page out to take a peek under the hood. In the land of Discard changes, we could do that without forcing the page back into draft with no edits. It would continue to show as published. I would check heading sizes of text, to be sure things open in a new tab, etc. If everything looked good, I could hit Discard changes and it was all good. My hundreds of editors often do the same thing, and some even hit "edit" accidentally and don't make any changes. My internal communications team often will make edits to try out new layouts or to see if they can add more content to a page (to see if a new page is needed) and will abandon their edits. I have hundreds of decentralized editors who cannot handle the word "Draft" as a status. At first I was getting 30-50 pages a week in workflow with no changes simply so they saw "Published" instead of "Draft." I have customized workflows with paid subscriptions so having content with no changes coming through costs my organization money. My team did a ridiculous amount of education about Discard changes to stop that from happening, and now we're down to 2 or 3 pages a month coming through workflow with no changes. I cannot unleash reverting using version history. It's not a concept the casual user can manage, and I have many people who work in sites daily who will not be able to manage it. I am in an industry where accuracy is absolutely paramount. If the wrong version of some content is published, it could lead to someone being physically harmed or killed. I can't have casual users reverting versions on their own, and I don't have the bandwidth to handle that on their behalf 50 times a week.

Is there some way you could make the Discard changes option available if only a single editor has made changes or to only discard one person's changes if they're using co-authoring? 

Removing the Discard Changes option on pages is one of the worst design decisions Microsoft has made for quite some time.

This is a showstopper for us. We have over 100k SharePoint sites with hundreds (if not thousands) of authors. This regression will cause major issues across our business.

Note: The latest Microsoft Lists rollout into SharePoint has been a nightmare for us with a multitude of thing breaking, including our List column/view formatting breaking, and users being able to remove filters we had applied to views, etc. But this change has an even worse impact.

Scenario (and an extremely common one)

We have flows (reviews, approvals, etc.) that run when a Page (Standard Page or News Article) is published. Now, if I go into a published page to check on some of the page layout and make some temporary changes (VERY frequent that this happens across all of our authors), I am now forced to restore the previous version to remove my changes, which will inadvertently move the page back into Draft mode and need to be republished. Republishing it again will kick off another flow, and the page will now be published by the user that temporarily updated the page, and on the current date/time. We absolutely need our pages and news articles to keep the actual date they were published and display who originally published them (these are displayed on the page) and not kick off additional review/approval flows.

It will also affect our version history which we rely on for auditing purposes. Before, I could go in and help someone with their page and discard my changes, or our authors could just play around with the design of the page and not have any intention of keeping their changes. Now, those users will end up in the version history when they didn't actually have any intent on keeping their temporarily changes.

You said the versioning solution will work the same as discard changes - but that is absolutely not the case.

I really don't understand the overall Microsoft (lack of) quality control, design decisions, impact assessments, etc. We also don't recall seeing anything about the removal of discard changes in the Microsoft Service Announcements which is a major issue in itself.

I would love for this rollout to be stopped but assume it's not possible at this late date. However, the Microsoft design/engineering teams really need to look at redesigning the co-authoring solution so users can truly discard changes. You said it's not possible, but that's just because Microsoft designed it like that - it's definitely possible. If I'm co-authoring and I discard changes then the other author will just see all my changes removed.

Another option would be to have two modes that you can select from.

• Single authoring mode where the author selects single authoring mode (locked to just that user similar to how check-out works now) and the author can still discard their changes.
• Co-authoring mode where the user selects co-authoring mode, and you can have multiple authors without the ability to discard changes.

We could then go into Single authoring mode to make temporary changes and discard as we do now. Seems like a simple solution to me and would provide the best of both worlds.

EDIT: I also noted this in the announcement:

What do you need to prepare? 

You do not need to do anything to prepare for this update, but you may want to let your authors know about this new capability.   

We absolutely need to prepare. We need to let our users know that they will no longer be able to discard changes on their pages.

Melito , Is there a technical reason that Discard has to be eliminated (i.e., is it causing errors/fails somewhere)? I understand that it technically can be done via version history, but that's not terribly intuitive (not least because it's so far at the bottom that it forces a down scroll to see it) and it feels strange to see a pretty standard, useful feature in day-to-day real-world usage eliminated.

cdsmythe007 If Page Editor 1 clicks "Publish" while others are actively editing, they get a warning informing them that there are others editing and perhaps they should wait until they are done. If they choose to publish anyway, Page Editor 2 will get put into read-only and the changes they had made up to that point would get included in the published page. Editor 2 can then go into editing mode to continue but those changes would be in the next version. 

For us, this is not a good implementation, as there is no longer a rejection option. We have over 300 authors. In the future, it will often happen that we find unpublished versions. The way via the version history is too complicated for the majority of our authors.

Ann_B1815 thanks for reaching out and for raising the concern over new versions being created if no changes are made. We're working on a fix to address this so that if you enter edit mode but make no changes, no new version is created. You can expect that will rollout to you soon. On removing the discard option, we believe version history provides the same functionality but even better as users can see the details of what changes were actually made. 

I see the Version History restore as an option instead of having Discard changes, but I find this to be worse. If I open a page to view how it is configured its now checked out to me and I have made no changes but will still need to "republish" the page. If I need to restore it to a previous version it will still show that I was the last person to edit it, when I made no changes. The removal of the Discard button is a major feature lost for Content Owners being able to monitor content without disrupting the metadata. Additionally, if alerts are set to send a notification "On change" I imagine just opening the page in edit mode now will trigger these alerts. 

Note that I've now submitted a UserVoice for this feature with regards to removing Discard Changes.

New Co-Authoring Feature REMOVES Discard Changes · Community (microsoft.com)

How will this new feature affect page approval workflows? If multiple editors save their own work, this will apparently cause several different approval processes to be triggered?