MrDubya
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Joined 13 years ago
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Bring Audit Trail into the Main Review Page
There is a hidden -yet very handy- feature that provides an audit trail of a review. I think this should be available from the main review page (and also include all review events). I have seen many requests involving wanting to know if/when a user has approved a review (as one example) that would remove this sort of uncertainty by putting the audit trail as a prominent feature of the review record. For those looking to see an audit trail (I don't think this has everything but does timestamp each approval), use this URL: <collaborator server: port>/go?page=ReviewTimeline&reviewid=<review #>477Views0likes0CommentsAbility to Customize Collaborator News
It would be great to be able to add our own custom announcements / content to the Collaobrator News section that appears on the home page, and tailor out SmartBear announcements that are not relevant to our end-users. For example, SmartBear will update the news feed with a new release, which we won't have plans to upgrade to for several months - so it would be good to be able to remove release announcements for example from the feed to avoid any confusion within our user community. Also, we often have non-critical announcements that would be nice to add to that section, instead of using the "system-wide message" feature which appears at the top of every page & highligted in red (more appropriate for critical announcements).396Views0likes0CommentsAdd Configurable Links to System Tray Application
Our Collaborator Server home page has been configured with several "Extra Dashboard Links" to take our users to related sites (our internal Collaborator tool site, support page, FAQs, Announcements, etc.). It would be handy to allow users to find these sites & navigate to them from the Collaobrator system tray application that is included with the Client GUI. At a minimum it would be nice to replace the "Support.." link in the system tray application with a link to our internal support site.387Views0likes0CommentsAdd "Uptime" Statistics to Admin Page
I am responsible for administering & supporting the Collaborator website however do not have access to log onto the website's host. There have been several instances where I would have liked to understand what the current uptime is of the Collaborator server / services, and I currently have no way of figuring that out without asking somebody (and even then I'm not sure how easy it would be to figure this out). Based on this my suggestion is to add uptime statistics to the Collaborator Administration page so that users like myself can quickly verify that the services are running normally and haven't recently shut down.457Views0likes0CommentsRe: Switch for a restriction finishing a review without comments
The tool obviously wouldn't parse the content of the comment(s) so from my perspective, having to log at least one comment before closing the review doesn't sound very valuable. I'm assuming the intention here is to enforce that someone actually reviews the material before closing it out, making the process meaningful - if correct, maybe adding a mandatory checklist with a comment field and/or adding electronic signatures would help enforce that the users need to take the review process seriously, and could be done with existing Collaborator software. Or if you really want to enforce 1+ comments, maybe a trigger could be added that counts the comments before moving to the "completed" phase?970Views0likes0CommentsRe: Permission to Create Defect - Role Template
Since the main purpose of peer review is to find defects, it seems unecessary (and counterproductive) to prevent any role, including the Author, from reporting them. For conflict of interest reasons, I could see that possibly you would want to avoid a process that only allowed the Author to enter defects, but if other participants can enter them (as they should), why not allow the Author to enter them too? Blocking any review role from entering defects introduces the risk of them being missed.3.8KViews0likes0CommentsRe: Review sent to rework displayed as requiring attention
When you click "Send to rework", there are different options presented underneath that determine when you are notified / sent back to "Active" status, and I believe the default is "Any activity occurs", so a tip if you don't want to be notified until files are uploaded, is that you can select the option "File activity occurs". If you click "Send to rework" - it seems counterintuitive to me, but that means you actually approve the reivew (once all the feedback is addressed) - I also don't understand why you cannot revoke that status and go back to a "Waiting" state once you have essentially approved by clicking "Send to rework". In older versions of Collaborator the button was always labeled "Approve", and I personally think renaming it to "Send to rework" made it less clear, and the review phases and corresponding "Next Action" buttons are not as intuitive as they possibly could be - that is also dicussed in other suggestion improvment topics on this site.1.9KViews0likes0CommentsRe: Do not remove Approval when Poked (both individual Pokes and via Poke Everyone)
This just came up for me today, and a warning about changing the approval status for Poke would have prevented a support ticket. I do think there are two things that would be good to implement: Warn the user when clicking Poke / Poke All that there are Approved users that will be sent back to "Active" & have to re-approve. Add options to only poke / email all unapproved users (with one click). The available workaround (click the individual Poke / email buttons next to the unapproved users) will be tedious for reviews having a large # of participants.4KViews0likes0Comments