SharePoint co-authoring in ProjectWise Web and Drive

SharePoint-based coauthoring allows users to co-author documents stored in ProjectWise. It is an enhancement over OneDrive-based co-authoring released earlier. These are main benefits:

• Users from multiple organizations can initiate and participate in the same co-authoring session
• Full control on file location during co-authoring which allows better performance and data residency control
• Files cannot be shared via Office ensuring that users always enter sessions via ProjectWise.

To begin using this feature, organizations need to:

• Configure one or more dedicated SharePoint sites.
• Change project configuration to use them

End users would continue using Co-authoring as usual. There is no visible difference, other than the improved capabilities.

Configuring SharePoint site for co-authoring

SharePoint sites used for co-authoring and organization defaults are managed in Office 365 Co-Authoring Settings page in Enterprise Administration interface (https://projectwise365.bentley.com/enterprise-administration/general).

To add a new SharePoint site suitable for co-authoring these administrative steps must be performed:

1. Register a new (empty) SharePoint site dedicated exclusively for co-authoring
2. Grant tenant wide access to the application that orchestrates the whole co-authoring workflow within the site. Consent to these two permissions is required:
   
   1. Sites.Selected – this is an application permission for Microsoft Graph which allows specific site Admins to grant Read or Write permission to the app. By itself this permission does nothing, but it allows the app to be granted permissions on specific SharePoint sites.
   2. User.Read – allows users to log-in and read their basic profile information (like email for invitations to co-author)
3. Give access to ProjectWise Office365 Integration – SharePoint application to allow control of the documents in the site created in step 1.
4. OPTIONAL external users: current iteration of the configuration wizard does not validate invitations for external users. It is up to the tenant and site owners to configure the external user policy in such a way that it would suit the organization security requirements and needs. Our co-authoring implementation does not have elevated permissions of any kind, thus if external sharing is off (or is off for that specific site) then invitations for external users to co-author will not work. External user policy configuration information can be found on Microsoft site here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/turn-external-sharing-on-or-off

Configuration wizard:

Configuring Co-Authoring in a project

Default co-authoring method used in a project can be changed in Document settings. Note that this setting will not change ongoing sessions it will only affect new co-authoring sessions created after the setting was modified.