Collaborator Feature Requests

  I often find most of the changes are boilerplate changes, typically the date and/or document revision number in the footer. This means “jump to next change” is not particularly helpful since it takes me through each footer of every page. I know it will be non-trivial, but it would be amazing if there would be a way to skip this sort of boilerplate change that changes on every revision and isn’t really a change. ... View more

OIDC is much simpler to set up than SAML and having support for other OIDC providers besides GitHub and Atlassian would be beneficial. Enterprises that have their own internal OIDC provider and don't (or cannot) use GitHub or Atlassian Crowd would benefit from a simpler A&A configuration.   ... View more

Requesting a setting for administrators to set to logout (and free floating licenses) after a set time of inactivity, ex. 1 hour.   My users have the behavior to open their browser to login to CC but unfortuanetlly don't close the tab, nor do they logout of the server, what hinders other users to not be able to receive a new license.   This is very important for our company. ... View more

Bringing back an old thread - I'd like anyone with Admin privileges to be able to move a review to Completed.   We've had several instances where someone has left the company, or is on extended leave, and their roles is required to move a review to completed.   On solution is to shuffle roles - while that will allow a review to close, it's "not right".   If the author of a document is out sick - yes I can assign the author role to someone else - but now you are fudging the review records in order to get the closure.   Later when an auditor comes in we have to give a song and dance as to why the roles in the review don't represent the actual roles the staff members have.   We shouldn't need to alter the records to move things forward.      The review is more than a record of defects - it's a record of who did what, and we shouldn't need to compromise that to get around a technical glitch.    ... View more

Rather than having to click on each file to exclude it would be good if we could exclude content by folder, by file filter, by holding down the shift key and selecting 15 files at once. Things that allow working with and excluding large lists of files easier and less time consuming to ensure just the essential files are included in any review. Not much thought or effort has been put into the current mechanism. ... View more

In collaborator it would be nice to be able to have emojis in the comments. ... View more

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

Many of the users of the Collaborator application in my company want to use it to review changes made to Microsoft Word documents. However, the document Diff Viewer provided with Collaborator does not have the ability to "understand" the word documents in a their native format - as it first converts them to text files and then displays them as PDF files.  Thus, the "context" of the changes is lost.    For instance, users would like to be able to ignore differences in versions of word documents caused by mere changes to document Header and Footer page numbers, for instance. This type of filtering is not provided by Collaborator's diff viewer, since it treats all differences between 2 Microsoft word documents the same (as basic text), whether they come from differences in body text, header text, footer text, table of contents text, etc.    Also, is there a way for Collaborator to see/create something similar to the "Document Map" that is provided in Microsoft word - this would simplify document navigation because then section numbers of the document could be navigated to directly. Also, if the section numbering, header, footers, body text, TOC of the document provided in the open xml format (namely the docx file) were parsed by Collaborator's Diff Viewer, and some functionality created to allow the Diff Viewer to potentially ignore changes in files caused by updates to Table of Contents, Header, Footer text, etc.  Currently, this type of filtering of word document changes is not possible in Collaborator's file Diff Viewer.  It would be nice if add-ins could be provided that would provide this type of functionality. ... View more

I would love to have collaborator integrated into VSCode. The Visual Studio .vsix doesn't install in VSCode 😞 ... View more

On the "Diff" screen when viewing the changes for a file, show its full (relative) path, not just its base name at the top of the screen. Sometimes we could have files with the same base name in different directories, or just want to verify the path of a file we're viewing the diff for. This could perhaps be a user setting. ... View more

Currently, when one creates issues and then sends to rework, the participant shows as "Approved" in the Participants module, which is highly confusing to our team. Obviously the review did not approve this review as s/he submitted issues and sent to rework. The participant status should be "Waiting" or some new status "Reviewed", but "Approved" doesn't make sense. ... 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

Hello, I would like to see license recovery (automated release) based solely on inactivity.  Specifically without regard to what tabs are open or anything else.  We have staff that multi-task and it's easy to sit on a license.  Then we end up spamming emails to notify staff to log out.  This is silly.  With some customer defined threshold (maybe 4 hours) we can assume the user is MIA and recover the license.  This seems like a standard feature in other shared license tools like this.  Was surprised this wasn't already implemented. ... 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

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

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

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

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