I don’t understand why this 6 year old article has been posted when current Microsoft 365 versions of Word et al have built in version control and real time collaboration.
Yep. They've had version control for at least a decade, diff'ing also, by way of Compare. I'm also not sure why people are fascinated with using git here. It's weird seeing all of the complex solutions in this thread for a problem which does not exist.
Edit: I meant 'fascinated with using git here in this context'.
i don't know why you are getting down voted for speaking the truth. I don't know a single person who this article would relate to in today's climate since everyone i know is using the latest version of office or on google docs.
I suspect most people in this crowd either don't have direct experience with Office 365, or haven't discovered its versioning/real-time collab features.
That said, "track changes" is still used extensively especially with parties outside the organization, especially for legal documents.
Some of the proposed solutions were very nice, particularly Draftable - but it's expensive and my bosses didn't feel it was worth it. To this day they still work on huge slide decks that are partially shared, but I'm just not involved anymore with that side of things so I stopped pushing. I still think a way of tracking Powerpoint decks on a slide-by-slide basis, with partial merging and synching, would be really good to have (existing features for embedding are '90s-era).
For Word there are quite a few solutions nowadays, most are clearly superior to the stuff Office ships with. So the problem is still there, just not as bad as 15 years ago.
I remember that discussion. If I recall, your experience was poor because you didn't have Sharepoint storage, yes? (merge conflicts?)
I use O365 collab features daily (with SharePoint/OneDrive) storage and the experience has been similar to that of GSuite. I regularly work on PowerPoints with multiple people simultaneously editing the slides.
It already existed at the time this article was written, as well, I think. There is probably a niche for purely ergonomic tooling that works with, not against, the built-in features, but a lot of this is a matter of positioning - I know some expensive and widely used legal document management systems that are strictly worse than the built-in features (regularly lose important data thanks to user error in ways that are impossible with the built in features). They still sell and get used.
Edit: I meant 'fascinated with using git here in this context'.