Using Acrobat Shared Review for Approval Workflows – Part 1

Life Sciences firms often have burdensome requirments for the approval of even the simplest of marketing materials due to the highly regulated nature of the bio-pharma industry.

It is not uncommon for each new marketing asset to require an extensive review from representatives from the line of business, technical experts, legal, marketing and other stakeholders.

Adobe offers tools in its LiveCycle family of products such as the LiveCycle Managed Review and Approval Accelerator, that help automate, track and move docments through workflow processes.

A server solution is most effective when there are a large number of users who need to be part of the approval process. Of course, to deliver this kind of solution, you need budget and the full support of IT, as well as the time and resources to implement it.

If you are limited in funds and need a solution right away, using a desktop tool like Acrobat can be a great alternative for document review which let’s you get up and running fast with virtually no IT involvement.

Acrobat Shared Review

Acrobat’s Shared Review feature allows multiple people, in real time, to add notes and mark-ups to documents, and to approve or reject suggested changes.

In order for multiple users to interact, a server is needed to act as repository for the comments. Acrobat synchronizes comments between all the users in the review. You can use any network folder that the reviewers can read and write to, or a SharePoint workspace which provides reviewers access.

To extend review to users outside the firewall, your IT organization could set up SharePoint as an extranet providing log-ins for partners.

Each user can choose when they want to publish and receive comments. In this simplified animation below, an Acrobat Pro user is publishing a comment and several Adobe Reader users are receiving the comments.

Note: I only show the syncing as one-way in the animation, but in fact all users can sync their comments with others on the team.

Read on to find out more about Shared Review.

Shared Review and Approval Background Materials

I’ve previously written about using Shared Review and even posted a narrated presentation. In that article, I covered how to set-up Shared Review in Acrobat 9.

Acrobat X offers a few additional features, notably the ability to relocate the review documents which broke workflows previously.

Here are some links to short videos Shared Review in Acrobat X::

• Getting Started: The Basics of Commenting on Anything in a PDF File
• How Acrobat X Facilitates and Manages a Shared Review with Ease
• How to Track your Review in Acrobat

The videos above adequately cover reviewing PDFs, but don’t address Acrobat’s ability to actually approve changes.

Approval Scenarios

A common time-consuming task in bio-pharma is managing changes in existing collateral. Whenver a change occurs, approvals from various stakeholders are required,

Here are two possible scenarios that you might encounter:

1. A review coordinator (you?) marks up existing PDFs and highlights proposed changes
2. Approvers review the changes and may accept them, reject them or suggest alternatives

1. An outside agency or internal marketing team will make changes to a document and PDF it
2. Changed items are highlighted by a Review Coordinator (you?)
3. Approvers review the changes and may accept them, reject them or suggest alternatives

Acrobat allows reviewers to approve or reject any suggested change:

Approve or Reject a change	See Results in Comments List

Making the Process Work Internally

As a review coordinator, you have a big stake in getting documents reviewed accurately and on time. That’s certainly the advantage of Shared Review for you, but in order to gain the cooperation of your colleagues, you’ll need to not only sell them on the idea but also make it easy for them to participate.

Here are some tips to sell this concept internally;

In my next article, I’ll walk you through the process of marking up changes and sending the file out for Shared Review.

Read on for Using Acrobat Shared Review for Approval Workflows – Part 2