Saturday, August 23, 2008

How to manage reviews with the Review Tracker?


The Review Tracker is a handy new feature that helps the review initiator organize participant comments, communicate with participants, and keep track of ongoing or completed review cycles, whether they are e-mail-based or browser-based reviews. To open the Review Tracker, choose Track Reviews on the Review and Comment Tasks button pop-up menu, or choose Open Review Tracker on the Options pop-up menu at the top of the Comments palette in the Navigation pane. As you can see in Figure above, the Review Tracker has two pop-up menus, Show and Manage, as well as two list boxes, one on top of the other.

The Show pop-up menu lets you specify which reviews are displayed in the top list box. Choose either All, Active, Completed, Sent, or Received. Note that displayed reviews are categorized as either e-mail-based or browser-based. Attached Expand (+) and Collapse (–) buttons on these categories, when clicked, display or hide individual review document names. Clicking a review document name in the review list displays that review’s status information in the list box directly below. Clicking the Open button displays the review document in either Acrobat, if it’s an e-mail-based review, or in your Web browser, if it’s a browser-based review. Clicking the Remove button deletes the review from the Review Tracker. The Manage pop-up menu enables you to communicate with participants associated with the selected review and contains the following options:
  • E-mail All Reviewers: Used to send an e-mail message to all reviewers associated with the selected review.
  • Send Review Reminder: Used to send a gentle (or otherwise) reminder to those participants who might be lagging in their rate of review contribution.
  • Invite More Reviewers: Used to liven up the party, especially if you find yourself using the Send Review Reminder command a little too often.
  • Go Back Online: Activates when you select a browser-based review in the Review Tracker list. This command, surprisingly enough, enables you to go back online and refresh the selected browser-based review for those who might be online at the very moment you decide to change the review status.
The Review Tracker also has the standard How To window navigation buttons at the top of the pane — How To, Home, Back, Forward, and Hide. Just don’t click the Home button and expect to be able to click the Back button to redisplay the Review Tracker. In order to reopen the Review Tracker, you have to use the Review and Comment Tasks button or the Options command on the Comments palette in the Navigation pane.