Explanation of "Review Cycles" in VisualAnnotate

System

If you're writing a custom workflow for VisualAnnotate and you want your snapshots to be divided up by "review cycle", you need to increment the "cycle" job variable after the content contributor has made changes (in workflow speak: add an external task that increments the variable after the "author work" task).

Consider the following scenario, that begins in review cycle 1.

Reviewer gets a task that indicates that she needs to review a file with VisualAnnotate. She enters review mode by clicking the "Review" button on the SCE or by clicking on a "Review and Annotate" link in her VisualAnntotate email.

She annotates the file to indicate to the contributor that changes should be made and clicks the "Please Revise" stamp. VisualAnnotate creates a snapshot of the file and its annotations. Since we are in the very first review cycle, VisualAnnotate notes that this snapshot was taken in review cycle 1. In the Reviews menu, the new snapshot appears under the heading "Review Cycle 1".

Since there is only a single file in the task and it was stamped "Please Revise", VisualAnnotate automatically transitions the task into the reject ("Please Revise") state. In this scenario, a reject means: back to the content contributor ("author work" task) for revisions.

At this point, the review cycle is still "1".

The contributor enters review mode in order to see the annotations that have been made on the file. Again, the review cycle is still "1" -- a new review cycle will begin only after content has changed and is ready to be reviewed once more.

The contributor revises the file according to the reviewer's annotations and finishes her task.

NOW...an externaltask in the workflow increments the cycle variable to "2". Content has changed, therefore the review cycle needs to change.

Reviewer once again gets a task that indicates that she needs to review the content. When she looks at the Reviews menu on the toolbar, she notices that the previous snapshot is listed under "Review Cycle 1". Now, if she wants to annotate the changed content and make a snapshot, the snapshot will appear under "Review Cycle 2".



Michelle Neuringer
Interwoven Engineer