Multi-user Collaboration Tools
Many professional designers do not work alone. In addition to other designers, there may be other managers and staff members who need the ability to provide input into a design.
The builder has been designed with full multi-user support, providing two collaboration features: Commenting and Locking. Either feature may be enabled or disabled by your administrator on a per-user basis.
Commenting
If your administrator has enabled this feature, you may comment on any row or content block in a design by clicking the "Balloon" icon, available in two spots:
- in the row or block outline, inside the editing stage
- in the header of the Row properties or Content properties
Clicking one of these two icons will activate the commenting panel, which takes over the editor sidebar. From there, the user can insert a new comment. After the first comment, another user can start a thread by adding a second comment.
Mentioning someone in a comment
If the "mentions" feature is enabled, users can type @ to bring up a list of contributors and tag them in the comment. If the user starts typing, the list is filtered. If you have a notification system around Commenting, this piece of information may trigger a notification towards the mentioned person.
You may receive an additional content dialog at this point, such as "Send an invite".
Interacting with threads
If there has already been some activity, the editing stage shows whether a content block or row has any comments by displaying a small comment icon. The sidebar instead indicates the number of existing comments for the selected row or content block, three in this case.
Activating the Commenting panel will bring up the thread. In this case, it will show the three comments.
Existing comments can be edited or deleted by the contributor that added them. Users may also resolve comments when they have reached a consensus and completed any pending task.
Browsing threads and closing the commenting panel
Clicking on < All comments in the top section will bring up a list of all comment threads, indicating which ones have been resolved or are still open. Users can search inside comments and filter out solved threads or those related to deleted content.
To go back to the editor sidebar, close the Commenting panel by clicking the X icon in the upper right or click on another row or content block in the stage.
Reviewers
Some users may only have a Reviewer role. These users may collaborate on your projects without changing the design. This role may be helpful if the design needs to be approved or commented on by non-designers.
In short, this new role has the following characteristics:
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Can't apply changes to the message
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Can add comments and start threads
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Can edit their own comments
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Can view other comments
Locking
Your administrator may enable you to lock both rows and/or content for editing by other users. Only users with specific permissions may edit rows or content locked by other users.
Locking Rows
Users may lock rows for editing using the toggle shown below.
If a user does not have the permissions needed to edit a locked row, they will see a friendly error when they attempt to select the row, notifying them that the row can't be edited.
Likewise, they will not be able to drag and drop any content blocks on the locked row, as shown here
Rows vs content blocks
If your administrator has enabled the appropriate permissions, you may be able to restrict access to layout changes while granting access to content modifications.
This allows you to grant editing access to the content while ensuring that the overall layout of the message is not altered, and that specific content blocks that should not be modified are left "as is". This way, for example, a junior member of the marketing team could focus on updating text & images, without worrying about potentially modifying the structure of the message in an unwanted and/or unauthorised way.
Or, as shown in the example below, the same user could update social media icons and links in the footer of an email, without altering legal language and dynamic fields used in the same footer. That's accomplished by setting us a social media module that's editable (unlocked), but in a row that's locked.
When users without the proper permissions try to edit, move or remove the row, they are told that they may not do so.
Similarly, if they try to edit any content in the row that has not been specifically unlocked, they are told that they are not able to do so. In this case, for instance, the user is not able to edit the merge tags used in the footer of the email.
However, when they click on the social media icons, they are able to edit it.
To accomplish the above, a user with higher permissions needs to:
- Open the message in the editor
- Lock a row
- Unlock one or more specific pieces of content within the row.
Locking Content Blocks
Individual content blocks can be locked instead of an entire row. When users without appropriate permissions try to edit a locked content block, they receive a similar alert message.