A "suggesting" mode for document editing (i.e. multiple document editing "roles")

Ideas & Features
1

I’d like to request a mode for doc editing that is the “Suggesting” mode as exemplified in MS Word and GDocs. To put it simply, changes to a document in this mode are “pending”, they are shown overlaid on the document view, attributed to the person who made them, and can be “approved”/confirmed by the document owner or anyone in/with “Edit” mode/permissions. This is a classic and very helpful mode/tool for collaboratively editing documents.

It is of course different from and functionally beneficial over Comments because it lets multiple people distribute the work of actually making changes, reducing the effort involved to a yes/no for the document owner, rather than reviewing a comment, then if they agree with a suggested edit, they actually have to go and make that edit, then go back and mark the comment resolved.

This may be out of scope for what Fibery wants to do, but the recent Fibery 2.0 info in the latest blog and the mention of product specs and documentation makes me feel like it might actually be a very sensible addition. I do recognize that the now-available Document History function does help with this kind of workflow, however it is cumbersome to use for a true editing workflow, and would not be acceptable as a tool to regularly use for this purpose for anyone who is used to what MS Word and GDocs can do.

I don’t know how difficult it would be to actually implement, but there are certainly some great existing models out there for how it could work. And now with the history function available, and multiple states of the doc clearly being maintained, in the back end I could see it being simply a way of querying the change comparison functions and overlaying the results on the doc in a particular way. The new interaction method for confirm/deny might be the thing most different from existing functionality. Anyway, obviously I can’t really estimate difficulty here, but hopefully someone from the team can weigh-in on it. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Basically if Fibery wants to ultimately be able to let people develop specs and publish documents from the ground up, this is probably going to be a desired feature for many.

2

+1 on this from my team.

As we’re currently beginning our implementation, we’re assessing how to manage collaboration on writing (proposals, briefs, copywriting, etc) in a way that is contextually linked within our Fibery workspace. One difficulty we’re having is that while Google Drive is an organizational nightmare, the google doc suggestion functionality is massively powerful to parts of our workflow.

At present, it seems our best solution is to either add google doc links (or consider a custom google drive integration). However, if there were a few additional features (in particular the ability to add suggestions) we might be able to stay completely within fibery which - as I"m sure you know - has a host of benefits.

3 Likes
3

@mdubakov, is this is on the roadmap?

1 Like
4

Unfortunately not this year.

3 Likes
5

We have exactly the same view on this; suggestions would allow us to stay completely within Fibery for all our reviewing of documents. For collaboration and as a knowledge management tool, I think this is a key feature. Reviewing on the writing and reviewing documents, this is a vital feature. For now, we need to link to a Google Doc when collaborating on the writing of texts, which is a lot; from specs, use case descriptions, documentation, etc.

2 Likes