This article was originally written for Messaging News Magazine, but it appears to have disappeared from the site.
“Would you please draft a first-cut of a document discussing our new product, pass it around in order to get feedback from the rest of us here, and then incorporate that into a near-final edition that I can pass by legal and corporate”. The poor soul receiving this request in a meeting will nod their head in token acceptance of the job at hand, and then return to their desk shattered at the painful job ahead. Regardless of their skill with the content at hand, it’s the tools and technologies that they are given which will drive them to despair. Drafting that first-cut in Microsoft Word is no big deal and distributing it by email to 5-10 significant others is also fairly simple. The problem starts when 5-10 edited versions are returned, and the original author has to decide what to do with each edit mark, who to give precedence to when suggested edits are in conflict, and whether to send out new editions to the slow-to-respond reviewers or leave them to comment on what is now out-of-date copy.
In this article we consider three ways of solving this document editing and reviewing chaos through collaborative technology.
Visualization of Multi-Person Document Editing and Review Progress
One way of solving document editing and reviewing chaos is to provide a visual map that shows the relative status of every version of a document, regardless of the person that holds it, and in context of both master and work-in-progress editions. From the perspective of the lead author, such a map would show that certain feedback has or has not yet been incorporated into their master edition. From the perspective of individual reviewers, they can see whether the edition of the document they are about to edit is the most appropriate one to spend time on, because a more recent master edition might be available.
I have long raved about the NextPage document collaboration service “NextPage 2” (see www.nextpage.com). I think every person using Microsoft Word to edit and review documents in a multi-person situation should have the capabilities that NextPage offers. In addition to the visualization capabilities provided by NextPage 2, alerts are automatically given when the author or reviewer starts to work on an out-of-date edition, thus preventing the individual from inadvertently wasting time looking through a superseded document. I have written previously, and will say it again, that if Microsoft is serious about improving the collaborative capabilities of Word, then it should acquire NextPage and make its capabilities standard fare going forward.
Server-Based Authoring
A second way of solving document chaos is to use server-based authoring tools, such as a wiki. Rather than typing the document into a local Microsoft Word document, the author starts a new page in the enterprise wiki. Once they are satisfied with the first draft, they notify the reviewers by email or IM of the address of the new wiki page. Reviewers visit the page to see what has been drafted, and insert direct edits into the page or leave comments at the bottom of the page. The wiki maintains a history of all revisions, and permits the author or a reviewer to generate a comparison of any two pages; this shows what has changed between editions.
Benefits of this approach mean that there is only ever a single copy of the document in existence: the current one on the wiki. Reviewers don’t have one or more copies in their email or lying around in desktop folders. There is no risk that the reviewer will accidentally open an old edition and think it is the current edition. What’s current on the wiki is the current one. A second benefit is that comments from previous reviewers are viewable by every future reviewer, so there is a net reduction in the time and effort required by the group of reviewers. If two reviewers both want to say something, only the first one to review the page has to say it; the second can merely nod their head in agreement or leave a comment to that effect.
There is a usability cost involved in embracing a wiki for authoring and reviewing documents compared to continuing with Microsoft Word: the visual experience is less rich. One of the inherent attractors of “Track Changes” in Microsoft Word is the different colors that it gives to comments and revision marks from different reviewers; you don’t get that in a wiki, and so it is much more difficult to see at a glance who said what.
Introducing a wiki for authoring documents instead of using Microsoft Word will involve some coaching and training of users; it is different to what they are used to, and will take some time to get comfortable with it and the best way to use it. Acknowledge this upfront, encourage open conversation about what is and isn’t working with it, and come to agreement as a group about when direct editing of the wiki page is best and when leaving a wiki comment is the way to go.
There are many wiki vendors offering wares on the market today, including a number of open source alternatives. I have successfully used the offerings from Socialtext (www.socialtext.com) and JotSpot (www.jot.com) in a number of projects.
Server-Based Editing and Review
A third way of solving document chaos retains the use of Microsoft Word as the tool for authoring the original document, but places the document to be reviewed on a Web server running special collaborative editing software. In this instance, I am specifically thinking of the PleaseReview offering from PleaseTech (www.pleasetech.com), which is available as both a hosted Web application and as a server to license for deployment inside the enterprise. There may be others offering similar capabilities, but PleaseReview is top of mind for me in this category.
Reviewers receive notification by email that there is a new document for them to review, along with a link to the uploaded Word document (see Figure 1). When the link is clicked, the Word document opens as an HTML formatted page within a Web browser. Once there, reviewers click the paragraph on which they want to comment. A pop-up window enables them to suggest a re-wording for the paragraph, note that a word is spelt incorrectly, or merely leave a comment about the paragraph. The beauty, as with the wiki approach, is that there is only a single document in existence to be reviewed, and all of the previous edit marks and suggestions can be seen by the current reviewer. PleaseReview is sufficiently flexible to handle other document types beyond Microsoft Word, including PowerPoint and image files, making it a natural complement to any environment where multiple people regularly have input into documents under construction.
Conclusion
The pain of co-constructing documents can be significantly reduced by embracing new ways of authoring and reviewing documents. If users do not want to change their use of Word and email, embrace NextPage. If users are open to a radical change, investigate wikis. Alternatively, if reviewers are interested in knowing what others have said in order to streamline their own response time, then PleaseReview is a must. Act now to make life significantly easier for the authors and reviewers in your environment!
