How conflicts/collisions are handled

Suppose 2 people start working on the same paragraph.

When the first person moves out of the content control containing that paragraph, their changes will be saved to the server.

When the second person finishes, their changes would overwrite the first person's changes.

To prevent this from happening, the software first checks whether the content control has been updated on the server since the person started working on it.

In this scenario, the answer is that it has been updated (ie by the first person).

So the add-in retrieves the updated content control, and uses Word's document compare functionality to compare the changes made by the first person to those of the second person. The result is then inserted in the second person's document using track changes markup:

The second person can accept/reject the changes as they see fit; the resulting text will then be saved as usual when they leave the content control.

If you want to test this feature using just one computer/user:

1. open two instances of a document in Word on a single computer.
   
2. Then put your cursor into the same paragraph in both documents.
   
3. Then change the contents in one instance, and move your cursor to a different paragraph in that document (causing the change to be saved).
   
4. Then click on the title bar of the other document, so the focus is on it, and your cursor is still in the paragraph (ie hasn't been moved outside of it). Make a change and exit the content control.
   
5. At this point, the conflict resolution should occur.
   

Note that there are still a few issues with this stuff. See Gotchas for details.