Under Community Review

In Review Space, Add the Ability to Put Attachments on Comments

The commenting functionality is limited to adding textual comments. This limitation has a significant impact for graphic-rich documents, for example, GUI-based documents. We need to get the images from the reviewer over email or using some other tool. It would be great if we can enhance Review and Collaboration to support adding images/files as comments, similar to Acrobat shared review. With Acrobat shared review, we can add both text and files as comments.

Noreen McMahan

  • Hi Noreen (and Tom), we have considered this request multiple times over the intervening years, and it is gradually moving up the list. From the various votes here and through other conversations, it is clearly an important use case.

    Still, I would like to say something about the approach that looks most feasible:

    To handle binary files like this directly is not ideal for a couple of reasons:

    • Often, this use case is about pointing authors to documents such as specifications or images that are centrally stored and governed elsewhere. They could be in a PLM, in an engineering change management system, or increasingly in platforms such as Sharepoint/OneDrive. To upload copies into Tridion Docs means that authors won't always see the latest updates to those documents. Or, to get the updates, we would have to introduce some kind of versioning on those attachments, complicating the interface. (Think about the way that attachment versions work in Confluence if you know that — it is not much fun.)

      So to take the common approach now of adding links and providing some icon or preview of those links, could keep people in sync better.

    • While the Tridion Docs database storage is of course very robust and used in many different scenarios, its primary design is to handle text and to also do a good job with images. Meaning that larger binary files are not the core use case. You can add them in the repository (the so-called "template" type), but we have always dissuaded customers from adding objects like video files, since they make the database grow very large, very quickly, and can affect performance.

      So for this reason too, the "rich linking" approach that so many KM/note-taking/collaboration tools use now, is better.

    I don't yet have an update on a specific release for this, but wanted to let you and other interested onlookers know how we are starting to shape this in the Product team.

    Any additional info on specific use cases would be really helpful for us to make sure we are thinking of this sufficiently broadly!

  • Yes, any kind of attachment should be allowed (docx, pptx, pdf, various images) should be similar to template objects that can be included in publications. Our end-users have requested this as well.