A collaborative authoring system and method is disclosed. A collaboration server stores objects and applications open the objects stored on the collaboration server as documents. Collaborative authoring is enabled through a combination of coarse-grained server locks on objects stored in a collaboration server for short term server transactions and fine-grained application specific internal locks to lock portions of documents for authoring sessions. When an application begins an authoring session, an object stored in the collaboration server is opened as a document in an application, a server lock is applied to the object, internal locks are applied to portions of the document, and the server lock is removed from the object.