Obsidian for research collaboration

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Will Obsidian ever be useful to support research collaboration?
I saw nothing about that possibility even in the long-term Roadmap.

At a minimum, I’d want to compare my vault with the vault of a colleague. Is there any plugin or other tool for that?

Should I give up on my Obsidian dream and just go with Roam?

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What exactly are you looking for?

They’re just files. Keep them online via Dropbox, Guthub etc and they can be shared with anyone you want.

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Thanks @Dor. If my colleague edits a file ported from my vault to g.doc, will I be able to port back the edited file into my vault?

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Do you mean Google Docs or Drive?

Issue is need to maintain md format.
Docs doesn’t do that, but there is an extension which will export into md.
Drive, no problem.

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So, then the workflow would be something like this?

  1. I post an .md file to my G.Drive
  2. My teammates download it onto their vaults
  3. They add their content to it
  4. They upload it back to our Drive
  5. I download the updated version into my vault

Is this the simplest way to do it?
I really hope that Obsidian or somebody will come up, someday, with something less cumbersome.

I’m the only one interested in collaborative uses of this great tool?

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It is likely to be easier with the sync option when it comes. Publish may do this too.
You could all have it in a single autosynced Drive but there would be the possibility of sync clashes.

At the end of the day, it is easier to manage team access to a database than team access to a file.

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I believe this is the suggested approach:

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The forthcoming Obsidian Sync feature will work differently, but this setup is available now.

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My vault is synced via Dropbox, so I can edit notes in both my macs and my phone. I am the single user, though. If I needed collaboration right now, I’d probably go with GitHub for better control over edits.

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Yes, good idea. GitHub (or other repo) is a good, viable option.

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Thank you so much @anon27868835 for sketching it out for me, a total newbie! it’s very clear

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For those using Dropbox to share a vault with another person, I was curious what your experience has been. I understand the experience is not the same as simultaneously live-editing a Google doc… I am not really looking for that level of collaboration. I am more keen on making sure that Obsidian can handle a vault that two users might be accessing and working on simultaneously.

  1. A simple situation is two users working simultaneously with a shared vault, but they are working with different files. Does Obsidian properly update its database of notes to keep up with changes? What about when filenames are changed, causing links to be updated in multiple files?

  2. Has anyone tested when the same file is being edited by two people simultaneously? Dropbox probably generates two versions of the file? I assume this is a rare event, but it would be good to know how Obsidian reacts when this happens.

Just in general, it would be interesting to hear users’ experiences with a Dropbox sharing setup. Thanks.

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