Adobe RoboHelp: SharePoint Shared Review

by Willam Van Weelden

A few weeks ago I wrote about Shared Reviews using Adobe RoboHelp. The Shared Review works by creating a PDF and importing the reviewed PDF into RoboHelp. This method works if only one or two others need to review your content. If you want multiple people to review your content, it is easier to use a server to collect reviews centrally.

Many companies use SharePoint for team collaboration. And with Adobe's Technical Communication Suite, you can use SharePoint to centrally store all reviews. The advantage of using a server is that everyone has his or her own copy of the document and all comments and changes are synchronized.

Note: As the person starting the review, you will need Adobe Acrobat on your computer (Acrobat is part of the Technical Communication Suite). Reviewers can use the free Adobe Reader 9 or newer.

Prepare SharePoint

Before you can use SharePoint for Shared Review, you have to create a workspace with at least one document library to store the reviews. All reviewers must have edit permissions for this library. Your SharePoint administrator can help you with this.

Creating a review using SharePoint

1. Open or create a RoboHelp project.
2. Choose Review > Create PDF for Review.
3. In the Create PDF for review dialog box, select any (or all) of the topics, snippets and master pages you want to include in the review.
4. From the PDF Settings area, select Send for shared review.
   
5. Click OK to create the PDF.
6. In the Send for Shared Review dialog box, choose Automatically collect comments on my own internal server.
   
   
7. Click Next to continue.
8. In the Send for Shared Review dialog box, select SharePoint workspace for your review.
9. Add the URL for the site that contains the workspace in the URL field. Note: You must add the URL of the parent site of the workspace, not the URL of the workspace or document library.
   
   
10. Click Get Workspaces to select the workspace and document library for the review.
11. In the Get Workspaces dialog box, select the workspace and document library you want to use and then click OK.
    
    
12. In the Send for Shared Review dialog box, click Next to continue.
13. In the Send for Shared Review dialog box, select the method for distributing the review. For this example I am saving the document locally so I can send it to reviewers manually. Note: This only determines how you send the PDF for review. It has no impact on the SharePoint workspace or where the comments will be stored.
    
    
14. Click Next to continue.
15. Set a name for the review settings. This allows you to use the same settings for other reviews.
    
    
16. Click Next to continue and then click Finish.

Important: Once you have created the review PDF from RoboHelp, don't edit the RoboHelp topics, snippets and master pages that are included in the PDF. The only way you can reliably import comments back into the RoboHelp project is when the content remains unchanged.

Document Review

You can now send the PDF to your reviewers. The reviewers add their comments to their version of the PDF. When they are done, they publish their comments to the server.

Import Review Comments

Once all reviewers have published their comments to the server, you can import the review into RoboHelp.

1. Open your copy of the review PDF.
2. Click Check for New Comments to get all comments from the server.
   
3. Save the PDF and close it.
4. Open the reviewed RoboHelp project.
5. Choose Review > Import Comments from PDF.
6. Click Yes from within the Import comments from PDF dialog box and then open the PDF.

Once the import is complete, RoboHelp displays the comments, inserts and deletions similar to the Track Changes feature in Microsoft Word. At this point, you can use a Review toolbar to accept or reject suggested changes within your project.

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Looking to learn RoboHelp? We offer a live, two-day online RoboHelp class once each month. Feel free to contact us to learn other ways to meet your RoboHelp training requirements.

Comments

[Joe]

We are using SharePoint Online 2013 and the workspaces template is no longer available. Is there any way to use this functionality without that template in SharePoint?

[Willam van Weelden]

A workspace is a subsite (the terminology in SharePoint is not consistent). So just put in the URL to your main site and make sure that there is a subsite linked to the main site.