Questions about Contributor Review Workflow

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mamarachel
Propeller Head
Posts: 39
Joined: Fri Mar 23, 2007 7:27 am

Questions about Contributor Review Workflow

Post by mamarachel »

Hi,
I have a Flare project and am sending topics for review to Contributor users. They have the full-version of Contributor. I am responsible for training them on Contributor, but I'm new to Contributor so I'm hoping someone will be able to help me out. These are the questions that I have:

1. Is it possible to configure the location that Contributor saves Review Packages (.fltrev files)? In testing Contributor we found the review package file in the Users/username/AppData/Local/Temp folder. The Contributor users want to archive these files after sending the files back to the author. It would be nice if Contributor could put these files in a location of the users' choosing. How do they do this?

2. What is the difference In Contributor between Save As and Save To?

3. The user tried using the Save To option, thinking that she could save the .fltrev file to another location. However, .fltrev is not an available file type. Would the best file type option simply to archive the edits made in the .fltrev be .mcdoc? (Other than going to the temp folder and moving the .fltrev files.)

4. When a Review Package is opened in Contributor, the message panel displays the above message. For the review workflow, do we simply ignore the message? Is there any way to stop the message from recurring, for example, when I begin to edit the file?

Thanks.
peckerdunne
Propeller Head
Posts: 32
Joined: Thu Apr 08, 2010 12:19 pm
Location: Watford, UK

Re: Questions about Contributor Review Workflow

Post by peckerdunne »

Re 1.
We save the packages on a Sharepoint server and email the authors when the packages are available. They then only have the latest version available to edit, so no more descending into version hell.
It's really handy to check out the files when importing Flare to prevent authors tinkering with them.
Also very useful when the authors make a mess of things. The file can be rolled back to a previous good version.
jherwig
Jr. Propeller Head
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Mar 09, 2015 5:38 am

Re: Questions about Contributor Review Workflow

Post by jherwig »

Hi Peckerdunne,

at http://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewto ... ev#p107495 i posted someting to a more or less similar process.
Probably you have a solution, how to avoid this anoying need for manual creation of fltrev-files for sharepoint.
And ... of course we don't want all the snippets etc. contained in each fltrev-zip redundant.
Imho it would be much easier just to work directly in the html and put the screenshots directly into the ressource-folder and afterwards to compare and merge that
stuff in flare.

Any ideas how to ensure "leaner" production with flare?

Joe
peckerdunne
Propeller Head
Posts: 32
Joined: Thu Apr 08, 2010 12:19 pm
Location: Watford, UK

Re: Questions about Contributor Review Workflow

Post by peckerdunne »

Hi Joe,
Your workflow seems to be more dynamic than what we have here. We publish technical manuals for a number of energy rating schemes. The same team of authors work on a cycle of manuals for new schemes and updating existing manuals. So it's a slower process.
When I'm told that a manual is to be revised, I manually generate the revision packages (using the ToC) and save them in Sharepoint and email the team leader. The authoring team have a deadline to finish their work. When the deadline arrives, I check out all the packages and produce the draft manual for approval. The team then collate their last-minute amendments and myself and the team leader go through them at my desk and publish the manual.
So, not much help unfortunately but it would be great if the revision package generation process could be automated.
Pete
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