Collaborator Feature Requests

Sometimes, you want a different person to look at something, or respond to a comment.  My team would like Collaborator to have a capability to tag another user.  For example, in Jira, you can use "@lastname,firstname" to tag another user.  We would like a similar capability in the comment boxes. ... View more

Very frequently comments are added in a review that need to be converted to defects.  The "ADD AS DEFECT" button is used but the defect text is blank.  In this use case, the comment is the defect.  This requires manual copy/paste, restating the comment, or adding a description of "see comment".   This product enhancement request is to pre-populate the defect text box when converting a comment to a defect.  This would steamline upgrading comments to defects. ... View more

User experience would be greatly improved if the reviewer could associate their comment or defect to a range of lines instead of just a single line.   Additionally, if that range could also be inclusive of characters within a single line that would also be appreciated.  When comments or defects are part of a large block of code being able to accurately call out an area of code instead of just a top line of code is helpful. ... View more

In the chat box of file foo.cc I would like to reference a specific line in file bar.cc. For example, I have bar.cc:line 12 written in my code collab chat box.    In this case, code-collab only recognizes and allows the jump to bar.cc, but not to the line. I would like a feature where a designer can write a reference to line 12 in bar.cc and Collaborator automatically auto-links the to the correct line.   ... 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is basically sudo-like capabilities for Collaborator.   ... View more

We're human.  We make mistakes.  And some of us are fastidious.  I hate seeing files which were wrongly uploaded or obsolete in my list of files to review.  Also, most of us like to be efficient.  We don't want to have to delete our whole uploaded file list just to clean up a few files.  We should be allowed to delete individual review uploads.  You have a nice tool, but it is frustrating not to be able to do so. ... View more

Currently when developers upload different versions of the same files using the eclipse plugin the files are identified based partly on their relative paths. This becomes a problem when these paths differ between uploads. This can occur for various reasons (like when release version information is included in the path) and cause files to be treated as unique files rather than new versions of the same file.    It would be very helpful to have a way to tell Collaborator that specified separate files in a review are actually the same file and should be treated as a new version of the file.         ... View more

Currently once you have typed a comment you have to use the mouse to click Add.   Ctrl+Enter should add the comment like in many other applications. ... View more

Hi, the authentication via LDAP is a nice feature to organize the user registration in a world-wide environment by use of several AD groups that can be administered business-unit-specific. Unfortunately the user is not known in Collaborator until his/her first log in. This results in three steps: 1. Adding to AD group 2. User must log in 3. Project admin can add user to group Each step results in a latency and communication overhead between the admin and the user. It would be great to have a button in Collaborator's user management panel like "sync with configured AD group xy" (similar to RTC for example). ... 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

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

Would be great if the code collaborator was supplied in a Docker container with configuration options to trivialize the spin up of a new instance and the upgrade to a new server version. ... View more