Under Community Review

Improve Change Tracking (Change Markup) in SDL Tridion Docs

The user group created a "task force" to revisit improving change tracking for SME reviewers. We defined which changes we would like to see marked up, and how we would like them to be formatted. I am attachingChange Tracking Requirements_June29meeting.xlsx the meeting notes for our meeting with SDL from July. We would like SDL to improve the way change tracking in handled in the product (potentially with a 3rd party tool like Delta XML and PS engagement... ). The current OOTB mark-up has been a sort spot for users for quite a while.

Elizabeth Gschwind

  • and all, improved visibility on changes is certainly on the roadmap. It is part of the general story around truly scalable, SME-friendly reviewing and contributions. There will be a webinar in June or early July (recorded of course for those who can't make it) that will cover this whole area. It will naturally be an iterative thing but even the first iteration will be a big step towards more complete coverage of these use cases.

    One other thing to point out -- as of Tridion Docs 13 SP1, the new publishing pipeline makes it easier to integrate a tool like DeltaXML for more sophisticated change tracking across entire publication versions. Understood that that does not in itself eliminate the need to create those object versions in the first place, but it certainly gives a useful, controllable change-tracked PDF.

  • and  and - the user group is looking for status on this idea. Many of us are really hoping this functionality can make it into the product very soon. (cc: to user group lead )

  • Former Member
    Former Member

    Both oXygen and XMetaL provide change tracking. Were the change tracking features of those tools and the processing instruction markup that they use a consideration? I would very much prefer SDL to non re-invent a new set of change tracking markup but to instead use or partner with the Authoring tool companies. We really would like to have the change tracking work across the tool stack and not just in SDL tools.

  • yes you got it right. One idea users had was to create some official "SME Review" status similar to "Release Candidate", and to track the review against the original baseline (or something like that). Another idea was to somehow use branching (without releasing) to track all the SME review versions of each official doc release (for example, if version 3 of a pub is for Product User Guide 1.2, version 3 could get created, then branched for the first SME review, branched again for the second SME review, etc., and then all the final comments could be merged back into unbranched version 3 for publication release.) To be honest, we had a lot of ideas on how to avoid version proliferation, but none of them seemed particularly easy to manage or obviously easy to implement. Perhaps Delta XML would have some insights? Thank you for asking!

  • Hi Elizabeth, as the new product manager for Tridion Docs, I'm reading through the list of ideas. I've looked through the spreadsheet -- thanks for providing it.

    One question: you had added a comment to say "we would all REALLY love for SDL to find a way to avoid version/release proliferation with the change bars". Do you mean avoiding needing to create a new publication version to get changes showing? Perhaps some way of showing all the changes in object revisions since the last publication version was created? (I don't know about feasibility but would like to understand the use case properly.)