I remember there was once a project called Verse, which allowed (or at least was supposed to) collaborative editing in Blender, even using Blender collaboratively with other applications.
Is anything along these lines (I.E. collaborative editing across a network) supported in the current version?
In short: no.
But I imagine that one could work on such functionality again. There is a Verse 2 being developed, with a better Python API. This could be a good next candidate, unfortunately this version is far from complete yet. Certainly an effort on the current version of Verse could be started again.
Blender does not provide a way for multiple uses to edit the same blend file at exactly the same time. *
However typically you can manage this by splitting your assets into separate blend files and linking from one file to another. Blender supports recursive linking so a scene, node-groups, animation, models, materials etc can all have their own files.
Here is the documentation for the linking structure use by the open movie; Tears of Steel
Some projects do this more fine grained, where the material, armature, mesh, action are all stored in 4 separate blend files and they are combined in a 5th, and composited in a 6th. But inter-linking complexity needs to be managed or you have a mess too, where you load a blend file and 100's of megabytes are loaded because files are interlinking in situations that might be avoided.
I have found the best way to manage linking is to only go in one direction. So for example:
Materials/Nodes -> Models/Rigs/Environments -> Animation -> Compositing
But never link an animation into a material file for eg.
This way its predictable and you can manage what loads in a more controlled way.
Update: since 2.78 its now possible to reload libraries without re-opening the file, see: Datablock and Library Management.
*Blender used to have Verse integration, but it was removed due to not being very practical to use for real projects.
If multiple people aren't working on the same object, you could separate one bit and Link it into the original file. So one guy works on the main file, and other people work on the Linked files.
Or you could separate everything and have a master-file that is not edited directly, but simply has all the separate pieces linked in and placed correctly.
As far as I know there is no native way for multiple people to work on the same file simultaneously
Yes, now we have a plugin called "multi-user" that allows real-time collaboration on Blender projects over the network. You can think of it as Google Docs for Blender where multiple people connected to the same network either through LAN or the internet can work on a common scene in real-time, with changes visible to each other.
It already has good documentation that should cover most of your questions on using it.
It's being maintained by a guy named Swann Martinez as his research project as far as I know. Since it's in the development phase, it might not be stable over all the aspects.
You can check out this video for a better understanding of the concept of the plugin.
Hope this helps :)
