When we first created Approver.com it was intended to be a simple solution for the mess that happens when people try to use email as a document workflow tool. One of the many unfortunate things that happens in email is when you want to share a document with, say, one or two trusted colleagues and one of them forwards the email to fifteen other people, causing a gigantic conversational train wreck in your inbox (and kicking off a discussion about a document that perhaps shouldn’t have been broadly circulated yet).
Because of this, we originally only permitted the author to invite reviewers to view a document. This worked pretty well, but some folks wanted more flexibility — they wanted to enable their reviewers to invite other people to review your document, just like you can in email. So tonight we made some changes to Approver.com that enable you to do just that.
Here are the details:
- You’ll see a new link on the document page that lets you turn reviewers-inviting-reviewers on or off for that document
- All newly-created documents will have “reviewers can invite reviewers” on by default (but you can easily turn it off)
- All previously existing documents still adhere to the old rules (only the document creator can invite reviewers)
- Reviewers can invite others to review documents when the document owner permits it, but reviewers can’t invite others to be editors or approvers (only the document owner can do that)
- The document owner can still remove a reviewer from the document at any time
In addition to making the feature available for people who want to use it, we’re hoping this will make it easier for you to share the Approver.com goodness with your colleagues. As always, if you have any questions about this or any other aspect of Approver.com, feel free to leave feedback or comment here.
