Co-Authoring Scale

Question

At what scale is co-authoring supported? For example, is 100 co-authoring an excel spreadsheet or word document supported? More than 100 people?

Does co-authoring work at the same scale on-premises as with SharePoint Online?

Answer 1

SharePoint 2013 On Prem:

You can limit the number of users who can co-author a document at the same time by setting the CoauthoringMaxAuthors property. This property only applies to Word 2010, Word 2013, Word Web App, PowerPoint 2010, PowerPoint 2013 and PowerPoint Web App documents. There is no upper limit to the number of users who can co-author OneNote notebooks.

To configure the maximum number of co-authoring users for Word documents and PowerPoint presentations by using Windows PowerShell

$siteurl = "<ServerName>"
$mysite=new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite($siteurl)
$mysite.WebApplication.WebService.CoauthoringMaxAuthors = <MaxAuthors>
$mysite.WebApplication.WebService.Update()

Reference: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff718248.aspx https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff718249.aspx

Performance and scalability considerations for co-authoring in SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online

SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013 applications minimize the performance and scalability impact that is associated with co-authoring in your environment. Office clients do not send or download co-authoring information from the server until more than one author is editing. When a single user is editing a document, the performance impact resembles that of earlier versions of SharePoint. Office clients are configured to reduce server impact by reducing the frequency of synchronization actions that are related to co-authoring when the server is under heavy load, or when a user is not actively editing the document. This helps reduce overall performance impact.