Why Shared Reviews?
We already had browser-based reviews from Acrobat 5.0, and then email-based reviews in Acrobat 7.0. So why do we now have Shared Reviews to deal with too?
A good question! It is an important one to consider if you are looking at standardizing on a way to conduct reviews on documents as quickly and as pain-free as possible.
If you are not familiar with Shared Reviews, then I am sorry to say this is not the blog entry to find out. But don't stop reading! There are lots of good articles and tutorials on the subject, including a video tutorial yours truly created last year, posted on this page, and an article on this very subject here from 2006 with Randy Swineford, Acrobat Product Manager.
So why are Shared Reviews the way to go...?
- You do not need Acrobat 8 to be a reviewer. That reason alone could justify the cost of Acrobat 8 Professional or Acrobat 3D Version 8, as those are the software applications you need to initiate a Shared Review AND enable the document for commenting and markup in the free Adobe Reader 8. Basically, it means virtually anyone can participate in a review cycle. Note, Acrobat 8 Standard can initiate a Shared Review, but it does not have the Reader-enablement goodness.
- The PDF document can be distributed anyway you like. Via the web. To an email list. From a network folder. On your childs iPod. It does not matter. It is a totally flexible workflow, because all the information that Acrobat or Adobe Reader need to participate in a Shared Review is baked in to the PDF document itself (at 400 degrees fahrenheit for 35 minutes, in case you were wondering). Whether you open the PDF locally in Acrobat or Adobe Reader directly, or within Internet Explorer, Firefox Windows or Safari, you can go ahead and give your feedback.
- You can get feedback from people almost instantaneously. Shared Reviews work by uploading comments to a Shared Location: a network share, a WebDAV folder (such as Apple's .mac iDisk), or a Microsoft Sharepoint Workspace. Other reviewers can see what everyone else is saying by reading those comments from the shared location. And Acrobat and Reader 8's Tracker And Shared Reviews Welcome screen also read those comments so that they can show who has responded and how many comments have been made.
- You can work online or offline. Unlike browser-based reviews which required you to be online at all times to submit and view comments, Shared Reviews cache the comments you add to the document until you tell Acrobat or Reader to publish them, or they get published automatically after a certain period of time (that is set in the Preferences, by the way). If you are working offline, the comments are cached in the PDF until you are back online and ready to publish. If you are disconnected, Acrobat or Reader will know it, cache your comments, and try to reconnect to the shared location to check for and publish only the new or updated comments. And if after all that you still cannot connect to the shared location server, Acrobat or Reader 8 will ask you a) if you would like to email your comments back to the initiator who can upload them on your behalf and b) if you would like to see ways to improve your social and professional status so that you always have access to the shared location server (kidding on that last one).
- Comments are tagged with metadata about you as a reviewer. Nothing too revealing ("this reviewer is currently participating in his pajamas" isn't in there), but information such as name, email, and a time and date stamp are included. This has a couple of benefits: 1) everyone can see who said what and 2) other reviewers cannot change your comments. That last one is particularly important. If you want to comment on someone else's comment, you can just reply in the pop-up for each comment or markup. It's like social networking chat, but with a purpose.
If any one of the above reasons seem compelling to you, and if you have not tried a Shared Review in Acrobat 8, it may be time do so. It really is easy to start a Shared Review session, and even easier to participate. Grab a document you are working on right now, convert it to PDF, and send it for Shared Review using Acrobat 8 to someone you know will give you glowing-but-constructive feedback, no matter how bad your writing skills are. Have fun!
Comments
Any reviewer can copy and paste the stamps or comments from any other reviewer. I can't find any way to disable this capability, which allows folks to falsely add someone else's "approved" stamp to other documents.
[ALI'S REPLY: It is true that reviewers can copy and paste comments and the text within them. However, with Shared Reviews, that newly pasted annotation will be tied to the person with the name and email address they used to join the Shared Review, along with a time and date stamp. So if you see two comments that are the same, take a look at who added at it and when, and you will have a clue as to what's going on. Note that you cannot change or delete another's comments. And to be honest, if your reviewers are going to lengths to try to mimic someone else's comments, you might want to consider sending them an email-based review separately, or excluding them completely.]
Posted by: Mike Nelson | March 10, 2009 2:07 PM
I've been using Acrobat for Shared Reviews for years, and I update review comments with the Set Status tool religiously, but I've never understood the meaning or purpose of the Migration and Review menu items. I use Review>Completed or Review>Rejected to mark comments I've acted on or rejected, and I use Review>Accepted for comments I act on but in a different way from what may have been suggested. I never use Canceled (how is that different from Rejected?) or any of the three Migration options. Are these documented anywhere, or is this a mystery feature only for Adobe insiders?
[ALI'S RESPONSE: Glad to hear you have been using Shared Reviews, Jim. I will be writing an article on these flags and how they are used with the "migrate comments" command soon. But for now, there's nothing secret about them. In fact, continue to use them as flags to help you track the status of reviewing comments from others. Stay tuned.]
Posted by: Jim Ramsay | March 19, 2009 6:08 PM
Sorry for the late post. I hope you can help me. I am trying to use Acrobat 8 to perform shared reviews using a network folder.
After I click Finish in the wizard, the process freezes. Nothing else happens. The review is not created.
I do have read/write permission on the network folder. I am using Acrobat 3D version 8.1.4.
Do you know how I can fix this?
Thank you,
Nicole
[ALI'S REPLY: Sorry for the delay in posting these comments - Adobe recently updated our blogging system. Anyway, you need to be able to read, write and delete files to the folder. Ensure you have full access to the folder's contents. Also, try a different folder or new sub folder just as a trouble shooting step to see if that works.]
Posted by: Nicole | May 8, 2009 3:32 PM
How to automatically enable Shared Review?
We are starting to use Adobe Shared Reviews for our workflow. We write our own in-house tools to do much of our workflow and document management. We want to start a shared review without going through the normal GUI interface - I.E. we want to automate starting the review from within our own in-house developed tool. Is there a way to do this? Are there command line arguments that make it possible? Are there scripts or other methods to automate starting a Shared Review that can be called from third-party tools (mainly our own)?
[ALI'S REPLY: There is no way to automate the initiation of shared reviews. However, there is a collaboration API to create custom review repositories: check the online collaboration documentation on www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat - it was created for Acrobat 8, but is still relevant for Acrobat 9]
Posted by: Tim Pehrson | May 12, 2009 10:28 AM