I end up attending a lot of "meetings" with departments at our institution that end up as more of a gripe session about how things don't work as expected in Office 365. In many cases, the end users just have incorrect expectations, and once I explain how those things are supposed to work, they're satisfied (not "happy", but at least they understand).
One common theme that's come up over and over relates to real-time co-authoring. "It doesn't work!" "I can't see what other people are typing!" "It saved HER changes, but not MINE!", etc.
I explain that there are recommendations on the number of co-authors (10) as well as limits (99) on the same. I tell them that it's important to have up-to-date versions of the apps (which often leads to another line of griping on how IT doesn't keep the user's devices updated) and also recommend that they use the web-based apps (rather than desktop apps) because - in my experience - it's more of a "real-time" experience. There's less latency/lag because it's basically a web page refreshing vs. a desktop app posting/getting data through HTTP calls.
This brings me to my question: does Microsoft have any sort of "official" Best Practices for co-authoring? I've found several pages explaining how to use it, how to troubleshoot it (if there is a specific message involved) and even in great detail how it actually works (locks and tokens and all that). But there's nothing that says "for best results, users should ... ". Whenever specific versions of apps are mentioned, it basically says "Office 2013 or newer". And I get that Microsoft is pushing the idea of "any app on any device", which sounds great for marketing, but is terrible when end users take that 100% literally.
