Having trouble getting used to VA

System

I'm working with our tech writer/trainer to figure out how to explain the workflows and such that we have to our end users. We're using 6.1. Most of our users will be working in CCSTD, but there are a large number who will do most of their work via url commands in emails rather than by using the GUI directly. This is the first time I've ever really used Visual Annotate and I've run into something that is a bit of a problem.

The way we're currently explaining it to users is that if an approver makes some annotations and sendss the work back to the user with the Please Revise stamp, the user will get the email and click on the View Annotations link. Once they understand the changes they need to make, they should unclick the Review button in the toolbar (putting an Edit button directly in the toolbar sure would have been helpful), which will show them the page without the annotations. They should then click the Edit link on the SCE toolbar which will bring up the DCT. They make the changes and....

Here's where things go wrong... As a general rule, we tell the users to click on Finish when they are done editing the DCR. When they do that, it will ask if they want to regenerate the page, which of course, they do. After they regen the page, another window opens to prompt them for what they want to do next. By default, they're going to submit it and leave it with the current task.

This is a problem because the task transitions and the reviewer gets a mail, but the last annotation on it is the one that he previously made. Now it seems that we could try to solve this by training the users to just close that "Edit Links" page that comes up after Finish is clicked, and to go back to the window that contains the regenerated page, click Review and then hit it with the Done stamp, but I doubt that we can trust our users to consistently do that.

It would be better to suppress the "Edit Links" page after clicking Finish, so that the users would have to do it that way. I'm going to go back and check out the UICG again to see if that's even possible. If it is, I may have another problem, because if it weren't for the annotation issue, I would think that we would want that window to come up so the user doesn't forget to do the next step.

If anyone else out there has had to deal with this and has any suggestions about the most user-proof way to do things, please let me know.

Migrateduser

Rob:

I think you're explaining the flow correctly to your content editors. VisualAnnotate is meant to be a tool that approvers use to mark up html pages, as a way of indicating what changes should be made by content editors. It's not intended to also be used by content editors to mark up pages they've edited and regenerated.

Though it's possible for content editors to access the annotation functionality, as you've noted, it's not the use case VisualAnnotate was designed to meet. What I think you're asking for is a wizard flow like this:

1) view annotated html to understand what changes to make
2) edit DCR to make changes
3) regenerate html page
4) annotate html page to communicate back to approver

Let me know whether I'm correct and I'll file the appropriate feature request.

thanks.

Michelle Neuringer
Interwoven Engineer