A new way to collaborate

A trend we noticed during 2020 was that suddenly Microsoft Teams was everywhere. Which got us thinking about how we can make eaDocX work better using the collaboration features of Teams.

And what we came up with was a whole new eaDocX Collaboration Edition. This is a totally new approach to collaboration for us – no more dedicated web servers, just super-smart documents.

This is how it works.

1. You create your Word document as normal
2. Then you choose ‘Generate – Interactive’, which adds lots of invisible text into the document – which eaDocX is going to use later. These are the identifiers of the EA elements and fields which the document contains.
3. Readers of your document can then add comments, or even make changes to the generated text. And if they are using Teams, several people can collaborate on reviewing the same document. And they don’t know your document was generated by eaDocX.

In the past, the problems for you, the document author, really started once this review had finished. Several copies of a document, some reviewed by one person, some reviewed by many, all needing to be thought about together before you make changes in EA. But now…

4. You pull all the documents into the new eaDocX ‘Review Manager’, which parses all the documents, and collects all the changes to each EA element (this is where the invisible text gets used). So you get to see all the changes from all the reviewers to each element, all in one place.
5. For the easy changes – spelling mistakes or other simple changes – you can just ‘accept’ the change, and add it to a list of updates to EA.
6. For the rest, you edit the suggestions or make changes yourself in EA.
7. When you’re finished, you can do a final check of the changes you’re about to make and then commit them all together.
8. And the really, really, clever bit – the documents you are checking don’t need to have the same content. That means if one group of readers got a summary document, and others got the detail, then eaDocX Revision Manager can still see that your readers want changes to the same EA Elements.

Find out more about how eaDocX helps you with round trips from EA through documents and back to EA again. For more information – see “Closing the Loop” on the Features page. Or take a trial of the new features and see for yourself.

(PS the new style Collaboration edition is only available from eaDocX v5)

This article is part of the April 2021 Newsletter. See more