Collaborator Feature Requests

In larger reviews, there are sometimes many chat windows. As the review progresses, sometime chats are "done", in that there is nothing more to discuss. These chats now polute the general chat space, and the "accepted" icon is removed if the author uploads another file (often causing the reviewer to look at old chats). Please add an ability to "close" a chat, where the "accepted" icon is kept on that chat line. Perhaps even the (sometimes long) chat bubble could be minimized once closed.. ... View more

The list of current reviews (or "Action items") only allows just less than 8 items to be visible, no matter what the size of my browser window causing me to scroll if there are a larger number of reviews open.   Could we have a splitter bar that could be moved down to make that list view larger and have more items visible without scrolling? ... View more

Several of our users complain about the volume of emails that they receive from Collaborator even when the setting is adjusted to minimal. Is it possible to collect the notifications in a different format such as a single digest email instead of an email per review? (e.g. You are a participant in X reviews which are past due. You have Y stalled reviews currently.) ... View more

When you add several changes from git via GUI client to one review there is no way to understand which repository the file belongs to. For example(screen in attache), if several commits contain files with the same name, you can only understand which repository they refer to using a hash. The screenshot shows an example when all 3 files with the same name refer to different repositories. Adding the name of the repository, and not just the file with changes, would help us a lot. Thanks for attention! ... View more

One fine summer day, "Jane Smith" (sAMAccountName/username == "janesmit") gets married, and changes her name to Jane Johnson.  After returning from her honeymoon and going back to work, she logs into her computer and other applications as "janejohn", and all is well.   Unfortunately, when she logs into her company's instance of Collaborator (which uses LDAP Auth) as "janejohn", it is as if she has an entirely new account - the old account "janesmit" is separate, and she no longer has access to the reviews associated with her old account ("janesmit").  Collaborator does not act appropriately when accounts are renamed.   Jane is understandably not happy, and writes an email to the maintainers of Collaborator at her company, asking for the accounts to be merged.  Unfortunately, Collaborator provides no such capability to the administrators of the tool, and Jane is sad.  If only SmartBear would add the ability for an administrator to merge accounts, Jane would be happy.  🙂   ... View more

In a regulated environment the compliance with development processes need to be proved. An organization needs to be able to access all artifacts for about 10-15 years depending on the regulation requirements. Therefore version control systems are used to guarantee the access for all versions of saved elements. If there is the requirement to perform reviews prior to check-in of content, the review data like comments, status and review material must be available during the whole time. But the review material should already be stored in the version control system so that it's storage in the Collaborator cache is only needed as long as the review is not completed. Especially Office documents that are converted to images use a lot of space on disk. It would help a lot to have a button like "Remove uploaded material of completed reviews that are completed since xxx date". ... View more

Our workflow is such that we want to clearly define when control of a review moves to a different participant. For example, I create a review and annotate it, and then move it to the inspect phase. The review progress then appears in my action items list (and on the system tray window) as "Waiting for comments".   However, as soon as the reviewer makes their first comment, it switches back to Perform, which is a nuisance since frequently the reviewer is still working on the review - they may find that a later file answers a question they'd asked, so they go back and delete an earlier comment, or edit one. The result is that I start responding to a comment which then gets updated or deleted by the reviewer, who isn't expecting me to have resumed work on the review since they haven't yet clicked "Wait".   It would be nice to have an option whereby Collaborator will leave the review progress as it is until the "Active" participant(s) click "Wait" to wait for further activity. This way, the reviewer can add/edit/delete their comments, approve files etc until they're happy that it's ready to pass back to the author, and only then have the author notified that it's ready for them again. Similarly, when the author then responds to the comments, the same functionality would prevent the reviewer from being asked to respond to the comments until the author had finished writing them.   This would not need to prevent participants from participating at any time, as it is very useful to have this ability - it would just prevent one person's changes from causing other participants to be notified and the review progress on their action lists to change. ... View more

Howdy,   Please add Code Collaborator support for AWS Code Commit repository integrations to the web client.   Example of this current functionality can be found here: https://support.smartbear.com/collaborator/docs/source-control/git.html https://support.smartbear.com/collaborator/docs/source-control/repo-hosting/index.html   In the same way that Github, Bitbucket, and Azure can easily be integrated to the Collaborator, I would like for this process to also function with AWS Code Commit Repos. I may currently use Code Collab and AWS Code Commit via the client gui and local changes, but I would also like to have direct repo integration like the hosted repos do.   Thanks. ... View more

Could you add multiple selection of Checklist Templates for a Review Template? (Example: In Collaborator, multiple custom fields can be choosen in a review template.) ... View more

This enhancement applies to Collaborator, version 9.4     In document reviews, the new pushpins are being rendered with opaque background.  The white background is covering the text under the pin. This makes it difficult to read the document when multiple pins are present. Example: => "wi??n"   You can click "Hide Pins", but this hides all of the non-active pins, but not the one you are trying to read at the time.   Please make the white background of the pushpin transparent or allow me to update the pushpin graphic file on the server to include transparent background. ... View more

One of our users re-opened a review to add a new reviewer. They discovered the previous review comments from other reviewers disappeared after that. This makes them very uncomfortable about their data and how they can have sufficient traceability information in case there is an audit. We recommend the following ideas for consideration: 1. Provide an option for users to keep existing data when a review is re-opened. 2. Add an option to allow automatic review export (such as PDF) when a review is closed and list all exports in the review as history. Admin can choose a repository such as CMS or artifact management system for PDF storage. 3. Save review as code to a git repository so users can see the changes and can revert back to certain stage if any issue occurs. Since it is in git, all activities can be recorded and can be traced.   There might be other possible solutions. The goal is to keep full traceability in the system. Thanks. ... View more

When a user attempts to upload a file that is in the "restricted file types" list (a .SH file for example), Collaborator does not indicate to the user that the file was blocked, causing confusion.    The Collaborator server should indicate to the user that some of the files were blocked because they are on the restricted file list. ... View more

When you have a review with many files and many comments on each one, it would be nice to only see the files that you still have to review. On the "Review Materials" section, could we have a toggle button that would hide/display the files that the current user has accepted and that haven't changed since? In that same section, could we also have a way to hide all the lines that the current user already approved (and that didn't have any activity after the approval)? That way, for files with many comments, you would very easily find the ones you should review. This is slightly different from the current highlighting which is already quite good. ... View more

Posting an idea on behalf of EUCHNER GmbH + Co. KG: Which would be very helpful for us if we could download the pins that are superimposed in the PDF as a file. Because in the report the positions are delivered but not transferable into the document without seeing the pins in the document. Since we also have a graphical part in the reviewed document, it's already necessary from our point of view to at least determine where these pins are to be assigned. ... View more

Submitting the RFE on behalf of James Wagner from L-3 Technologies, CSG: Allow reviewers to change what they are waiting for, when the review is in the Rework phase. For example, a reviewer wants to become Active only when the File Activity occurs instead of Any activity. ... View more

Currently doing Peer Reviews with LabView does not work.  The users would like to be able to put comments on the LabView diagrams.  Saving each file to pdf to be able to comment on each is not a great solution.  There can be many files and files are coordinated with each other. ... View more

On large reviews, it can be hard for a reviewer to track which files they've completed reviewing, if there are defects or discussions still ongoing.  In that case, you don't want to mark the file as accepted, so it would be nice if there was a "Review completed for this version" button or flag. ... View more

I have a team working on Gitlab integration with Colalborator. When merge requests are made on the GIT side, a Collaborator review is automatically created. Unfortunately, the Group and Templateis selected somewhat randomly.    According to customer service they are "The last Group and Templated that the merge author happened to use".  Often this is the wrong choice.  WHen we change them by hand we then lose all the other auto filled data in the review.   Give how well the GIT / Collaborator integration is set up, it would be nice to have a way to specify Group and Template to use for the review.  ... View more

While attempting to add the path to a script as a first parameter to a trigger and all the needed arguments I noticed that all input boxes are limited to 255 characters. This limit is not allowing me to create complex triggers and offer robust solutions to practical issues for my users.   Please remove the 255 character limitation on all input boxes within the "Triggers" page.   Here is an HTML code fragment showing the limitation as seen with Internet Explorer Developer Tools.     <th>Parameters:</th> <td> <input name="triggerArgs1" class="PlainText x-form-text x-form-field" id="triggerArgs1" onchange="wizardConfirmNavigate = true;" type="text" size="60" maxlength="255" value=""> </td> ... View more