I have had a trial account for a while now.  Was holding off buying until I actually had someone I needed to collaborate with.  Well that day came today, and I realized that I had been assuming Creately worked like an interactive white board.  I was coaching an employee on how they needed to revise an ERD database diagram for a class we had them take to bring their DB skills up.  Although we accomplished the task by having them save each revision they made, and me exiting creately, then coming back and opening the document, we were able to work interatively in real time.  We were using google video chat to talk as we worked.

I did not come off looking as lick with my choice of Creately as I thought I would however.  Glad I didn't suggest doing this with a paying client.  

A refresh button would be sufficient.: 

Assuming multiple users working on the same diagram at the same time (assumes they are meta communicating using chat/ video-chat), it would be sufficient to have a protocol where one person inputs a revision, announces they will save it, and then the other collaborators could hit refresh.  Not as elegant as you might like, but I am cognizant of the difficulties of managing state in a browser based application.  To reiterate, to be able to hit a refresh button, that basically refeshed the document to the most recent saved version on the server, irrespective of who saved it, would be a sufficient feature.  A revision history tab, which would allow anyone in the group to roll back to a prior state, and then save so that the "saved" version that everyone else could refresh to would then be that prior version.  (You would have to determine how many versions your business model can sustain in an account)  

I know that the Creately standard of interaction calls for something more dynamic, and cooler - but I would settle for that, and without some ability to "whiteboard in real time" creately is not that useful for me.  Although it is clearly useful.  The support for the ERD diagram was very very nice.  The little key icons really helped my staff person get the primary key/foreign key concept they had asked me for help with - because they functioned as a visual "reward" .

I just found out about this and it makes me immediately regret having selected creately for my project.  I was working with someone else and we both made changes at the same time.  I saved mine first, so he lost everything he did.  I think this is a big enough deal to cancel account.