Bidirectional Sync: What Is It & How Does It Improve Collaboration Think about any initiative (no matter how small) at your organization. Chances are good the work required multiple people using many, different tools. The importance of collaboration between people on a team is generally well understood; others may be able to see things you don’t and help you improve in new ways. But what about collaboration between tools? Can they also collaborate? This is possible in modern, collaborative teams through real-time, bidirectional syncing. In this article, we’ll define bidirectional synchronization and explain its importance. We’ll also show three innovative use cases and show how you can get started with bidirectional sync. What is bidirectional synchronization? The basic principle behind bidirectional syncing is that if people collaborate, their tools should too. Bidirectional syncing transfers content from one system to another (and vice versa) in a fast, effective, and automated way. We can illustrate it simply as: When it comes to doing their work, people have diverse preferences and requirements. Some prefer to write in a text editor, while others use a web-based editor. Some like to write in Markdown, while others gravitate toward a WYSIWYG editor. An e-commerce company employee might have to work in a CMS (content management system) to update product descriptions while others might only have access to an inventory management tool. For a team of diverse contributors to be as effective as possible, they need to work with the tools and environment that suits them best… and this means they will likely be using different tools in different environments. But manually coordinating and syncing data across tools and environments is a big pain. It usually involves many emails, copy-and-paste, and occasional data conflicts, costing the team a lot of time and toil. Bidirectional sync removes these challenges by seamlessly transferring data between systems. Why is bidirectional syncing a game-changer? Bidirectional synchronization is more than just a convenience—it is a transformational capability for modern teams because it provides: 1. Flexibility: Bidirectional syncing allows authors to work in their preferred environment without sacrificing their ability to collaborate. 2. Efficiency: Bidirectional syncing eliminates the need to manage changes between different tools manually. This saves a lot of time and reduces the risk of errors. 3. Consistency: Bidirectional syncing ensures all team members work with the most up-to-date content. This reduces the risk of duplicative work as well as outdated or conflicting information. 3 game-changing uses of bidirectional sync To give you a sense of how impactful bidirectional syncing can be, let’s explore three concrete scenarios that highlight the power of bidirectional synchronization: 1. Allow contributors to use their preferred AI assistants There are a lot of AI assistants available today, from Google’s Gemini to Github’s Copilot. These assistants help with taking notes, improving content, and answering questions. But you can’t always use them in every tool. With bidirectional syncing, you allow contributors to use their preferred AI assistant to write content wherever they want. A specific example of this is ReadMe’s custom GitHub Copilot integration named Owlbot. It provides AI insights and answers based on your existing documentation and is available through VS Code (a widely used code editor). And with ReadMe’s bidirectional synchronization feature, a developer can use Owlbot from VS Code and a technical writer could use Grammarly in ReadMe’s GUI editor. 2. Communicate status updates quickly Bidirectional syncing makes it easier to communicate status updates to stakeholders, which: Makes them feel more valued and engaged Saves you and your team the hassle of answering multiple status update requests Keeps everyone on the same page An example where syncing status updates in real-time can be especially impactful is incident response. Let’s say your organization’s website goes down. The team in charge of website maintenance gets notified and starts addressing the issue. If that team uses bidirectional syncing, they could sync information and updates both internally and externally using tools like GitHub, PagerDuty, StatusPage, and Sentry. This would help them resolve the issue more quickly and communicate status updates to stakeholders with minimal effort. 3. Leverage external contributions Bidirectional sync also makes it easier to incorporate external feedback and contributions to your content. It allows you to review the feedback in context and make changes knowing these will be automatically synchronized. There are several tools for getting content feedback., from a thumbs-up/down feature to a feedback form. If you have a system that supports bidirectional sync, the process of reviewing and applying feedback from external contributors is much easier than it would otherwise be. For example, imagine you have API documentation in a public GitHub repository. A developer outside your organization is reading your docs and notices a typo. They suggest some changes in a PR on your repo. With ReadMe’s bidirectional sync capability, you can review and merge this change from GitHub, knowing it will be synced with any other changes without manual effort. This means no copying files, sending messages to coordinate changes, or debugging why merged changes aren’t showing up. How to get started with bidirectional syncing There are many ways to use bidirectional syncing, depending on your team’s needs and the tools you use. Here’s a general guide to get you started: Identify what tools you and your team use Find bidirectional syncing services that support your tools It is possible to build your own syncing tool, but it’s usually easier and more reliable to use an existing one. Choose the best tool for your context This decision will take into account things like: Price Ease of installation/use Features Support Set it up and start syncing! Additional considerations for bidirectional sync Before enabling bidirectional syncing, there are a few questions you should consider: What are the security implications of using bidirectional sync? Be mindful of where your data will be synced to and how it will get there. For example, will it be encrypted during syncing? Can the bidirectional syncing system of your choice handle your organization’s data volume? Bidirectional syncing systems can typically handle a lot of data relatively quickly. But if your use case is going to be very data intensive, it’s a good idea to check with your synchronization provider to make sure it’ll work. Use bidirectional syncing to make your documentation more accessible and effective If people collaborate, their tools should too. That’s the basic premise of bidirectional syncing and the foundation of building a collaborative team without sacrificing an employee’s ability to use their preferred tools. By now, you likely have some ideas about how you can use bidirectional syncing within your organization. If you are passionate about creating quality documentation and are looking for bidirectional sync capability, check out ReadMe’s bidirectional sync feature which syncs API docs with a GitHub repo.