Beyond editorial use cases, InDesign is heavily used in architecture for creating client presentation deliverables due to its superior handling of PDFs. In my field, Experiential Architecture, I collaborate with multiple architectural consultants, designers, technology specialists, copywriters, and client teams to build extensive decks that showcase creative direction, user journeys, architectural studies, and more. However, due to the longstanding lack of collaboration features in InDesign, the default has become slides, Keynote, and PowerPoint. As a result, almost no one knows how to use InDesign anymore.

A new collaborative feature in InDesign would not only enhance the creative process for all professionals replying here, but it would also open the door to industries beyond publishing that require a more design-forward collaborative software.

It is now 2024, this request was submitted in 2017. This is a much needed feature add and would help us all so much! Powerpoint, of all programs, has this collab feature...just saying...and Figma...

1. Whats the role of the different people working collaboratively on the same file. Are they always only designers or are other personas also involved.

There would be be some authors and proof readers too to get involved.
Even a client that acts as author für a new Version of a flyer based on a Template.

2. What is the use-case here, some parts of this request suggest an Editorial collaboration whereas others suggest collaboration amongst different designers. I am trying to separate these 2 requests out.

- Multiple designers working on a magazine
- Designer, Editor, Proof readers and Authors working on a long document

3. What are the different kind of files (brochures, books, magazines etc) for which this is required.

- Magazines
- Books

- A set of business Cards
- Flyers for multiple Locations

4. Does it need to be a web based service, or having the user be able to collaborate on one shared file using InDesign or InCopy on the Desktop will work? What is the advantage you feel over a web-service over the desktop app?

- For the Text Based Collaboration a Wesbervice would be easier for onboarding collaborators.
- For Designer Collaboration a Desktop Option would offer more Features.

5. How do you workaround this need today? What are the most important problems with the current workaround?

- Proof Reading: Comments in PDF and Review, with all its limitation
- Collaboration between Designers: Splitting up Documents
- Generating new Versions: Indesign Server based Web2Print Tools
- Everything together: Canva

The difficult part is to have rights management.
I would prefer this to use the same "assignments" as we have with an InCopy workflow where artilcles can be assigned, checked in and checked out.

My comapany puts out a monthly magazine, and with little time to design, we often have all hands on deck. Our workaround has been creating duplicate files and eventually copy and pasting.

The share for review and comments are nice, but all it needs is the collaboration ability with other designers.

It would be nice if Adobe InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator had proofing and approval capabilities like Oppolis Cloud (https://www.oppoliscloud.com).

This feature is critical for large editorial teams. It allows for multiple people to be working on a document, such as 5 people working on 5 different spreads. Or being able to see live changes to a document, without having to send file packages back and forth.

1. Multiple design to be working on the same layout or alternative layouts.

2. the use case is for easier workflow for remote working teams where a junior designer does grunt work and a senior designer can suggest or implement changes.

3.all files that InDesign can create? I don't see why this matters if you have multiple people working on the one thing.
4.work on the Desktop app is miles preferable.

5. today's work around is packaging and leaving the whole file to the other personal try to manage version control, which is a pain.

I would love a feature like this, I work in a design team that is split geographically with lots of remote working, and this would really help us when we are working on a document that has tight deadlines.

replying to anonymous:

First, no program offers the typographic controls and capability that designers need to make exceptional layouts except indesign, and to a degree, illustrator but illustrator is really lacking. Indesign is one of the only type control programs that can actually get anything done at scale for lots of pages. It's a real shame, because every single program adobe makes I pretty much use, often for motion, and type control is never good enough for designers to do what they do without a bunch of hacks. Bulleted list and numbered list? No? Option 8 for a bullet it is, or flying open a glyph panel I guess. Manually returning and spacing bar for hanging indents on lists... that sure makes animation fun with all those empty spaces in there. I digress.

1. Primarily designers and copywriters, reviews would be nice but not as helpful as coediting a doc in real-time.
2. co-creating layout design so we no longer have to try to share and manage multiple clunky revisions in hundreds of zip files emailed back and forth and lost, changes confused, it's a mess.
3. everything indesign makes re: layouts
4. No one cares, as long as it works. It should feel like using google docs, invision freehand, keynote cloud collab editing, sketch collaborative editing... etc... the assumption is cloud-based makes it much easier to achieve this, but not one cares how you do it, just that it works and feels right without breaking and destroying work.
5. It's the classic outdated pain, package it up, send it to another designer, they make changes, then they package it back up, send it to another designer, package it up, hoping you are all still on the right version of the zip folder, trying to remember what it looked like two versions ago that you liked... hunting down the zip in emails, cloud storage, slack, all over the place. Indesign is a huge pain to make work with across a team, so most of us just don't.

Please add this functionality! It would be nice to have the option to add user roles (designer, editor, reviewer) to the document.

This would be helpful for the magazines we churn out with little turnaround time.

A desktop experience like Adobe XD where we can have cloud documents would solve this need.

The way we collaborate using InDesign today is through making separate files for articles and compiling them later which causes breaks in character and paragraph styling and large inconsistencies.

Adobe is behind on this. Especially for large InDesign files, working simultaneously is vital.
1/2/3. We're a small firm that uses InDesign for investor packages, and we'd like to have 2-3 people working on different spots in the document at the same time (ie. our Principal, Director of Ops, and Designer). Roles aren't clearly defined as editor/designer, and everyone would like to make changes instead of waiting for one person to update and share the file, which is (5) our current workaround.
4. Web-based service seems to make the most sense for simultaneous collaboration, but we couldn't care less if we were able to live-collaborate on either.

we have 2022, we are still in the middle of a pandemic and the amount of remote working people is still rising... There are so many tools out there allowing simultaneously working on one document... but adobe says: "oh, well, we have this totally innovative creative cloud where you can share documents" Really?
Ok, I see the point.... its been over 20 years and Premiere, After Effects and Photoshop still just share the Companies name.... so how it could even be possible to make other people collaborate...
Sorry for all this sarcasm, but especially after the experience we all made during the last 2 Years, make those questions above feel quite ironic.

I would really like the ability for my clients to make TEXT EDITS but nothing else. The cloud service would be similar to the existing review functionality but directly linked to the story text, so that I can accept/reject marked up edits.

We are a weekly newspaper with two people laying out the newspaper. We currently have to work serially, since Indesign does not allow for both people laying out the newspaper to work at the same time. This adds several hours to the time that it takes to get our newspaper ready for print. The two layouters often work in different locations, so a web based linking would be preferred. We currently work around this issue by adding several hours to the layout. If both people could work at the same time it would be very helpful for us.

Just wanted to bump this as a highly requested feature I could make use of. Especially with design based collaborative processes, nothing with the formatting solutions of indesign is available collaboratively and it sucks.

When I saw this feature request, after 6 years of running a literary magazine (SAND), it was like seeing a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. We have come up with so many workarounds over the years to try to deal with the final proofreading/editing stage of our publishing process and all of them have been extremely frustrating. InCopy just doesn’t do what we need in this area. The fact is that a designer is almost never an expert in text and the ability to have editors and proofreaders request changes (similar to track changes in Word) and make comments directly in the design file, ideally online, would save so many
miscommunications as well as missed/misinterpreted corrections and centralize our entire workflow during the design phase right where it belongs, in InDesign. Our designers will also be thrilled that they can focus on their actual designs and not comparing our pesky requests across so many PDFs, emails, etc.

1. The Creator (master user) would be a chief editor, who can easily review the history of edits on each page and batch-finalize changes if the end look is right. Trusted Designers get their changes auto-approved. Assistant Designers must have ALL their changes/additions finalized by a Trusted Designer. Text-only Editors would be useful---with the ability to add, move, edit text boxes, and make assignments.

2. I produce a 72-page spread magazine called Mythulu eMagazine every three months. I have to do it single-handedly, even though we have two assistant designers, because they're still learning basic design principles and I don't have a way to review their edits and undo them easily.

Our magazine team is growing---now multiple writers, editors, and a magazine assistant. But we're struggling to manage workflow, and it all keeps coming back to me after raw text approval because I'm the only person who has live access to the files.

Right now InDesign supports text assignments through InCopy, but 80% of the people who would the InDesign file aren't initial content creators. They are all reviewing all the content in passes---one person checks spelling. Another verifies font styles. Another cleans up alignment. Someone else is responsible for putting in attributions and fact-checking. When everyone touches the same content for different reasons, InCopy no longer makes sense. It HAS to be a live-collaboration view.

With that in mind, the BEST IMAGINABLE VIEW for the Chief Editor/Designer is for everyone on the team to have a filter view that highlights every object type on the document that their user is responsible for. When they have done their personal part for that object, they can mark it "done"---but it's only done for their user. The Chief Editor could see at a glance what content hasn't been verified yet and what still needs to be done for it. Chief Editor/Designer should be able to mark an object fully completed (which locks it) and/or check the box on behalf of another user.

3. Any InDesign file! Especially bigger projects. The bigger the project, the more desperate we are for live editing.

4. Web and desktop are both okay. I expect the web version would be reduced-feature, but even being able to adjust images, fonts, master pages, basic layouts live collaboratively and manage designer specialization would be a huge benefit.

5. I do everything myself. 😭😭😭😭

Where are we at on this? Share for Review is ridiculous for trying to manage a whole team's comments on a large document, no one can neatly see the comments that are just for them, and the markup tools aren't consistent for all users. For instance, my client made edits with the pencil and shape tools, and after an update suddenly I can't see anything, despite any view mode in InDesign, changing browsers, swapping to a PC, swapping to another Mac with an OS one version behind, etc. The client had to completely redo their comments for a 100+ page doc, and I was embarrassed that I had even recommended this tool the app keeps pushing.

Figma has collaborative projects and their app is free! Adobe is not cheap, and this lag in innovation is eating up valuable production time where content editors are having to fiddle with comments and designers are left to translate or enter them in one by one. Even Import PDF comments is flawed because it requires the user to be absolutely perfect with their changes (no trailing spaces, for example). We need something integrated that is easy for clients to use. Most of us are working with people that don't have Adobe experience and we can't dedicate hours to go train them on InCopy, especially since most of us designers have never needed to use that side of the editing process.

The reason a web app is so important is that content edits and responses to content questions need to be accessible on the go. Someone shouldn't have to download an app on their phone or be on their computer to approve a comment or say "hold on this edit for now", for example.

As someone who has really enjoyed InDesign, being able to work with multiple people in the same document is a game changer. If this does not become a feature in InDesign I'm going to start doing presentations in powerpoint, where this is possible.