Workshare Compare for More Efficient Review and Approval of Document Changes

benallenallen Alfresco, Documentum, Hadoop, Workshare Compare, , ,

We have recently been working with multiple clients that have streamlined their review and approval process to increase throughput and decrease turnaround time.  One key process improvement is allowing for quick and simple annotations during the review cycle.  TSG’s OpenAnnotate provides for quick, browser based annotations and now includes Workshare Compare integration as well.  This post will present how OpenAnnotate combined with Workshare Compare can be used to further streamline the process of reviewing and annotating a document.

More than just Annotations

OpenAnnotate, like other TSG products, is constantly evolving our products based on client requests.  Features such as “Collaboration Mode” for concurrent annotations and chat are examples of recent updates added on request of our clients.   To see a complete list of features, consult our recent post on OpenAnnotate 2.5 Capabilities.

Workshare Compare

TSG has partnered with Workshare to support our “Compare Versions” action within our High Performance Interface (HPI) for doing spot comparisons between different versions of documents in a repository.

Our newest enhancement to OpenAnnotate is to allow reviewers to gain this same version comparison capability while annotating a document.  Reviewers, while annotating, can look at a differences document to look for what has changed. Reviewing and annotating a minor change to a document can be simplified as the user does not feel compelled to read the entire document in detail for the items that have not changed and can quickly indicate their thoughts on the parts of the document that have changed.  See a quick video below:

Some business benefits of this approach include:

  • Legal/Contract Management – to compare contracts/documents and review/annotate during the review/approval and negotiating process for quicker turnaround
  • Compliance – documents go through many edit cycles between review and approval. Workshare can provide the ability to compare versions to automatically identify changes to speed the approval process.
  • Insurance – similar to legal, the ability to compare documents during editing as well as review/approval cycle.

For more information about TSG’s Workshare integrations, or to set up a demo, visit our Workshare Solutions.

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.