Revizr positions itself as online document collaboration that embodies everything the wiki is not. Its functionality begins and ends with ownership and privacy in mind. Organizations who’ve been steeped in the emerging values of an open enterprise should steer clear of this solution.
But if you find yourself pining for a digital reincarnation of the writing process of yesteryear, when your editor’s red ink touched your copy only after you were darn good and ready for it, then Revizr is the digital incarnation of all your hopes and dreams.
Whatever your feelings about ownership and document collaboration, Revizr is really only suitable if you’re looking to write finished products, rather than perpetually on-going collaborative works. The truth is, Revizr is more of an online co-editing tool than anything resembling the kind of document collaboration most people are familiar with from the new breed of enterprise software solutions.
Instead of using access controls and versioning to allow filtering after publication among coworkers or the public, Revizr works on the filter-then-publish model.
Through either importing or writing directly in a text box, you can input the documents you’re working with and where they can be marked up and commented on by those you choose to share them with. Direct hands-on editing is basically impossible by design, since all changes you make are made in red markup and must be approved by a document owner.
Aggressively retrograde software can be strangely appealing sometimes. Revizr certainly knows it’s based on a traditional model, but it’s innovative in the sense that it has taken an old methodology and created a SaaS platform around it. And it works, in it’s own special “get off my lawn” way.
