In various implementations, a productivity application allows selected content from an electronic document to be shared with and edited by multiple users through instances of a collaboration component. The collaboration component includes a distributed data structure that stores state information about the shared content. The component also includes application logic for managing the state information to reflect user edits and other such changes. This allows the selected content to be shared with the users in any application that supports the collaboration component and without the entirety of the document having to be shared. A user can experience the content in the context of applications other than the productivity application that hosts the document.