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.

Participating in an e-mail-based review

The following list gives you some pointers on making a review cycle run smoothly, whether you’re the initiator or a participant in an e-mail-based review:

• When you open the FDF attachment in an e-mail-based review, a Document Status message informs you that the document has been sent for review. You must be using either Acrobat 6 Professional or Standard versions to participate.
• When you’re finished annotating a PDF file, save the file with your changes in a convenient place on your hard drive so that you can review the document without having to open the original e-mail attachment.

This also provides a copy of the reviewed PDF in case you want to share the reviewed PDF file by e-mailing it to others (you’re not allowed to enter additional e-mail addresses when you choose File➪Send Comments to Review Initiator).

• If you want to send additional comments to the review initiator, open your saved version of the reviewed PDF file, edit or make additional comments, and choose File➪Send Comments to Review Initiator again. The initiator will receive your revised PDF. (Note that any comments you deleted in the revised document will still appear in the initiator’s version.) Initiators can use comment filtering and deletion features to keep things legible.
  
• When you receive a participant’s copy of the reviewed PDF file and open the FDF attachment, your original PDF document opens. If the original can’t be found, you are prompted to browse for it.
  
• If you want to make changes to the original PDF document, save those changes under a different file name in order to preserve the original; otherwise, participant annotations may appear in the wrong places in the edited document.
• Use the Review Tracker to manage the annotations you collect in a review cycle, whether it is an e-mail-based review or a browser-based review.

Sending Out PDF Files for Review in Windows

Acrobat is known for its arsenal of useful annotating tools, and Adobe continues to improve those tools, as you discover in later sections of this chapter. What makes Acrobat 6 such a worthwhile upgrade is the addition of e-mail based and browser-based reviewing. These new reviewing features, available to users of Acrobat 6 for Windows, streamline the initiation of a review cycle by allowing you to distribute a PDF review document either by e-mail or by posting the PDF file on a network (intranet or Internet) server and allowing participants to review it in a Web browser.
Here’s how a typical Acrobat PDF review cycle works — the initiator of a review distributes a PDF document to reviewers, known as participants, who then use the Acrobat commenting tools to annotate the document for the edification of the review initiator. The initiator then reviews the reviews of the reviewers (sounds fun, right?). Acrobat enables you to set up either e-mail-based or browser-based reviews. When deciding which type of review to use, note that with e-mail-based reviews, participants don’t need access to a shared server; with browser-based reviews, participants can see each others’ comments on an ongoing basis.