Collaborate with Shared Review

When it comes to collaboration, even though 75 percent of workers rate collaboration as very important, surveys show that 39 percent of employees don’t feel that the organization where they work collaborates enough.

What’s more, as millennials enter the workforce, the need to provide collaborative tools increases as this group has grown up with social networks and communication applications that allow them to talk, share and work on just about anything with any colleague.

PDF software is among many software solutions today that incorporate features that allow teams to work together. That’s where the Shared Review tool in Foxit PhantomPDF comes in.

Why use Shared Review

In order to literally “get on the same page,” teams must collaborate on document development. So you need an easy way to enable collaborators to add comments, insert notes, and perhaps even strike through paragraphs, all without ever printing a page. The Shared Review feature in PDF Editor software such as PhantomPDF gives you exactly that.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking toward the deadline for your document to be finished. So you need to be able to get feedback from people almost instantaneously. Shared Review gives you that, too.

Using this PDF software, you have the ability to host documents on an internal server and share them with reviewers who can mark up documents with a full set of commenting tools. You can also set deadlines for these reviews. All while collaborating in real time.

Getting started with Shared Review

You’ll find full details on how to use Shared Review in the User Manuals for Foxit PhantomPDF Standard 7 and Foxit PhantomPDF for Business 7. If you’d prefer a video, see the Shared Review video on our Tutorials page. But in a nutshell, Shared Review goes like this:

1. Using Foxit PhantomPDF software, open the file.
2. From the toolbar, select SHARE.
3. Click the Send for Shared Review button.
4. A popup appears allowing you to select the path where you’d like the file to reside. Use Browse to locate the folder, or type the file path, including the server name and folder. Make sure to store the file in a location that’s accessible to all reviewers, such as a network folder or a SharePoint workspace.
5. Choose your delivery and display method.
6. Provide email addresses of all reviewers and send your invitation.

Getting feedback

To see collaborators’ comments, you can open the shared document and click Check for New Comments. Or configure the interval for Foxit PhantomPDF to check for new comments automatically.

Clicking on the Review Document’s Comments button on the left toolbar opens the list of comments that reviewers have added to the file in page order.

You can expand these to see who made the comments and what they had to say. Reviewers add comments to the document by using the comment tools in the PDF software just as they would for any other document. Anyone has the ability to respond to others’ comments in the same manner and click Publish Comments to share them with the group.

As you can see, the shared review feature of your PDF software helps teams keep track of suggested changes and edits to documents. And it brings teams that much closer to a collaborative workplace.