Review and Annotation

Overview

Documentation is a team sport. Very few documents are solely created by one person, yet much of the software used to create documents was designed for individuals, not teams. Because of this, collaboration usually ends up being an uncontrollable combination of email and overlapping document versions to be manually collated. Besides being inefficient, error-prone and insecure, this approach does not scale and is difficult to audit.

As a platform specifically designed for collaborative document review and annotation, PageSeeder is based on two fundamental concepts:

  • Who can see the content?
  • What functionality is available to them?

Using the PageSeeder group / role permission model as an architectural foundation supports this process with maximum flexibility and security, allowing for content to flow from one stakeholder group to the next with minimal friction. For example:

  • A publisher develops text books and accompanying assessments,
  • Based on part of the text book, a teacher with access to the pool of assessment questions and answers, creates a quiz and assigns it to a class,
  • Students respond to the assignment and post discussions visible to the class and teacher,
  • Submitted answers are only visible to the teacher,
  • Once graded and annotated, assessments are shared back to each individual student,
  • Aggregated scores are shared with the entire class,
  • The publisher reviews the assessment questions for quality (does ambiguous language lead to consistently wrong answers?).

Whether the content flow is vertical (the same content processed by multiple stakeholders) or horizontal (delivering different content to multiple stakeholders), PageSeeder can support a range of document review models.

Developers

The inbuilt group and role model makes implementing collaborative solutions straightforward and dependable. Stable, mature services reduce the resources necessary to verify content integrity and security. Primitives like the following simplify implementation and reduce development time:

  • Email notification of comments and task status changes,
  • Due date, document and task status, assignee and priority,
  • Activity tracking and reporting.

Analysts

The native user interface can be used to develop proof-of-concept implementations without any coding. Support for commenting through website interface using Simple site. Implement solutions for multiple people and multiple organizations.

Review and approve both conventional documents and electronic forms.

Users

Parallel collaboration reduces the review “noise” created when multiple people make the same comment. Embedding comments directly against content in the document allows issues to be addressed individually, making review more focused and efficient and eliminating the need to split and collate comments from different reviewers.

The ability to turn comments into tasks reduces the cost of review and improves productivity.

Features

Permission model

Everyone in PageSeeder groups are members with a role. In order to manage other users, a group member must be a manager or higher. Roles considered higher are moderator, approver (when these two roles are the same person it is expressed as (Mod & App) and administrator. 

Download permission model diagram

Notification

Is generated by the PageSeeder server and never stored. This is in contrast to comments or tasks which are stored within the groups to which they are posted.

Examples of notifications are:

  • Confirm Change of Email Address,
  • New Member email,
  • Reset Password email,
  • Edit note.

Audit trails

The Activity report helps to track all changes, by person or date, to a publication, including:

  • Edits and edit notes,
  • Workflow or status updates,
  • Comments,
  • Tasks.

Task management

Overview

Tasks can be created and managed with configurable metadata such as:

  • Assigned to – nominates the Member responsible for the Task.
  • Priority – nominates the importance of the Task.
  • Status – nominates the state of the Task.
  • Due Date – nominates when completion of the Task is required.

Changing the metadata is possible by editing the group properties, available via the Administration menu, Group configuration page.

Reporting

View and sort tasks by Title, Status and Assignee.