Start, Join, or Cancel a Collaborative Authoring Session

Collaborative authoring must be enabled for your organization by Veeva support.

If a document is compatible with Collaborative Authoring, the Edit in Microsoft Office button is displayed above the document.

Start a Collaborative Authoring Session

Complete the following steps to start a collaborative authoring session:

  1. In the Library tab, open the document you want to edit.
  2. From the All Actions menu, select Edit in Microsoft Office.
  3. If your browser prompts you, confirm that you want to open the document. Vault opens the document in Microsoft 365 on your desktop.
  4. Edit the document as needed, keeping your Vault browser window open while you edit.

If another user joins your collaboration session, an icon with their initials or profile picture is displayed in the Microsoft 365 menu bar. Click the icon to view the user’s edits or to contact the user. If you don’t see other users’ edits, verify that you are viewing the document in Microsoft Word’s Print Layout view.

Join a Collaborative Authoring Session

When another user starts a collaborative authoring session on a document, you can join the session and edit the document in Microsoft 365. When you open the document in Vault, a banner is displayed at the top of the page indicating that another user started Collaborative Authoring, and a message is displayed on the document to indicate that it is being edited.

To join the collaboration session, select Edit in Microsoft Office from the All Actions menu.

Cancel a Collaborative Authoring Session

Who can complete this task? Veeva Basics: Document Owner and Admins of the respective app.

Once you have started a collaboration session, you may cancel it to end the session for all users without saving any changes to the document in Vault. Only the document owner, the user who started the collaboration session, and users with permission to cancel checkout can cancel it. None of the changes that you made to the document during the session will be saved in Vault.

  1. Close Microsoft 365 and return to your Vault browser window.
  2. From the All Actions menu, select Cancel Editing.
  3. In the Cancel Editing dialog, click Continue. Vault ends the collaboration session and does not save changes you made to the document.