SyncDesk is a multi-modal real-time collaboration platform integrating code editing, rich-text documents, interactive whiteboarding, and chat in a single web environment. It allows multiple authenticated users (e.g. students or teams) to co-edit content within a private "room." Built with a React frontend and Node.js/Express + Socket.IO backend (MongoDB for persistence), SyncDesk propagates edits (characters or drawing strokes) word-by-word to all participants. It exploits Engine.IO transport (upgrading from HTTP polling to WebSocket) to achieve near real-time updates (observed <100 ms round-trip in local tests)1. The contributions of this work are (1) a unified multi-tool architecture for collaborative editing, (2) fine-grained synchronization using Socket.IO events, and (3) role-based access control with persistent versioning. These address the gap noted by Wang et al. that no existing system integrates these varied collaboration modes23.
Gupta et al. (Thu,) studied this question.