Here’s an educated guess: You work with other people. You sometimes have to work on the same documents together. You send a lot of emails back and forth with those documents as attachments. They have awful file names like 0312_BigReport_v3_FINAL.pdf.
If any of that sent shivers down your spine, prepare to rejoice. You never have to do that again.Revisu is out of beta and into the wild, and you will be so glad. Instead of vague email comments and countless files in crazy formats, your team can just go to one Web address for the whole process.
Revisu is a dropbox for documents you share with a team. It makes it easy to leave comments and propose changes to a document and track them over many versions. Team members can comments alongside the document or pin a comment to a specific place in it. It’s an ideal way to leave comments on a visual design or text document, but it’s hardly limited to those use cases.
The makers of Revisu tell an even scarier version of that attachments story. A major U.S. retail chain prints many millions of copies of its newspaper ad insert. The document is designed by a huge committee. Its contents are passed back and forth via email endlessly in horrible and huge Excel files.
When it’s time to approve the final design, the whole team gathers in a room with the mockup projected on the wall. When someone in the room suggests a change, the team can’t just note it on the projected draft. Someone has to open up the horrible email attachment Excel file again and note it there. In text. In a spreadsheet. Wouldn’t we all be better off avoiding that grinding process? Revisu makes it simple.
Revisu understands all your typical file types, including Microsoft Office files, PDFs and images. The team is working on adding more, starting with project files for all the Adobe applications (it’s pretty good at Photoshop files already). While Revisu has been big with designers and architects in the beta phase, the team is even talking about adding video capabilities.
Each document has a shareable Web address, so instead of attaching a file to an email, you can just paste in a link. Any file Revisu can understand, it will display in the browser. Gone are the days of incompatible versions of Microsoft Office. Everyone on the team can see the exact same document in their browsers, and all they need is the link.
Yes, Google Docs can do in-line comments and import Microsoft Office files and PDFs. But you can’t put comments on the precise part of a design you’re discussing. And good luck convincing Google to support Adobe Fireworks files. On the downside, Google Docs does have actual editing capabilities for simple file types like text documents. You can make the changes proposed in the comments, which Revisu can’t do. But for design projects in Photoshop, that would be impractical anyway.
It would also be great if the Revisu workflow made it easy for the team to actually download edited versions of the documents in the correct format. The tool is still focused on making and sharing comments, rather than implementing them. But the major pain point for teams – that awful email process – is solved by this centralized place to comment.
You can sign up for Revisu now and see whether it’s for you. The basic account is totally free, and there’s a great reason for that. Freelancers who use Revisu for client work bring it with them. They say to their next client, or to their employer when they go in-house, “Hey, I use this great tool called Revisu to track revisions. Can we use that?”
The free account allows 10 simultaneous projects and up to 256 MB of storage, plenty of space for a small team. Big organizations can pay for more space. Revisu even integrates with Basecamp to help with project management, and there are more integrations and an API coming soon.
Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock
