what seems the best way of sharing lots of different text files for collaboration

@Diana Mathioudakis -

While I love Miro and find it useful for so many purposes, if the main focus of the collaboration is shared text document editing, why not just use Google Docs?

Kiron

No- The main purpose ist workshops and exchange. But the object of interest is literature and writing. So what we do is we want to have our txts on the Miro board to present them and discuss and work together in exchange - and several of these documents are going to some collaborative revision. 

We want the canvas of Miro and the opportunity to work with our texts on this canvas. In depth work than is done in a text editor but the exchange in Break Out Rooms is done like world cafes.

AND we are in classical self organisation … which uses Miro for organisation development purposes on the go as well. 

@Diana Mathioudakis - You can collaborate on text on a Miro board, but you will be limited.

There are a number of key elements that you have not included in your use case, e.g.:

• How much text?
• Will the collaboration be synchronous or asynchronous?
• Do you want to format the text?

A few limitations when considering using Miro for your use case:

1. Both Text objects and Shapes are limited to 6,000 symbols per box
2. Text boxes and Shapes do not have the same formatting options (text boxes allow for lists)
3. If you intent is real-time, synchronous collaboration, only one person can edit an object at a given time - it will be locked for everyone else, e.g.:

   

4. You cannot use Miro offline.

I’m sure there are more limitations that I just not thinking of at the moment.

Google Documents does not have these same limitations. Again, without knowing how you plan on collaborating, I can only speak from my past experiences of collaborating on text documents and Miro was not the place for me to do this. Instead, a few of us jumped on a Google Meet call (Zoom, Teams, etc. would also work), opened a shared Google Document, and could see each other’s cursors, so we new where the other person was and what they were referencing when they spoke.

However, maybe Miro will still work better for you. I would suggest reading through the following Help Center articles:

• Text
• Shapes
• Google Drive → Embedding Google Drive documents into a Miro board (Note: the Google Drive document opens in a popup and is not truly embedded into the Miro board - for this reason, you can just link to a Google Drive document).

Thanks a lot, Kiron:

let me specify a little bit more.

Team of 20 users in 2-4 projects 

Users: little to strong digital affinity some with a high level of anxiety towards digital stuff 

Text complexity and volume: 500 - 5000 words in word or pages

Meetings 1- 4 times a month in break out rooms 

asynchronous work on projects like sprints in the mean time

We are doing it now since 6 months and it works very well - but due to the high level of fast growing complexity with texts hanging on the board as text files in word it is getting slow on our different boards. 

The reason why I did not start the transition to google drive as yet was lowering the thresholds overall and having to deal with only 2 challenges at the same time (Zoom and Miro) and getting used to text collaboration. 

But I presume it would be the next useful step to integrate a cloud service like google drive into the workflow. 

any further input would be very much appreciated. Especially concerning the slow approach and onboarding.

all the best, D

@Diana Mathioudakis -

It is not optimal, but a different approach rather than using text boxes where only one person can edit at a time, is to consider using sticky notes as a method of “stitching together” content. That way, multiple folks can all be working on the same paragraph or topic.

From an onboarding perspective, sticky notes are just about the easiest tool to use for collaboration in Miro. The only challenge is that exporting the information will be pretty rough as the CSV export does them in the order in which sticky notes were created rather than how they are arranged on the board.

Kiron