Best practices: Word document proofing and document storage

[ljanz]

I am wondering how others manage their copywriting proofs and documents. What is the lifecycle? Where do you save? Do you use the proofing tool or the approval workflow? Do you prefer people make suggested edits in Workfront or in the Word doc (as review comments)?

Our current flow:

Copywriters save document on their local drive, uploads to the proof tool, then updates as needed with new proof versions. When the designer needs it, they download the final to their local drive. We don't like to have the copy proofed in the design layout as that creates too much back and forth.

What I'd like to see:

Word document saved in a Sharepoint library, synced with Workfront to proof. Versions can be seen in Workfront and Sharepoint. Designer doesn't need to download the copy document to their machine to work on it - they just open up the synced file. Is this possible? If not, is this something on the roadmap?

[JillAc]

We have integrated sharepoint so you link from the documents tab to workfront and it eliminates downloading and uploading. Then we use the comments feature in word for reviewing rather than proof. We don’t use approvals for copy at that stage and approvals are done in proof within the final design.

[JamesMa4]

This is basically what we've started to do too, except we haven't yet integrated with Sharepoint, so we're using OneDrive. Not ideal, since the OneDrive folder belongs to an individual and is shared with everyone, vs. a Sharepoint site.

@Jill Ackerman‚ was it easy to integrate with Sharepoint? It's on my to-do list, but we have a stringent IT group which may make things more complicated.

Thanks!

[JillAc]

I'm not IT so from my point of view it was really easy!

[ljanz]

Interesting. I tried integrating but we have some permissions issues. It seemed like it required everyone to be an owner of the Sharepoint (or Teams) site in order to utilize it and we can't do that globally.

[JillAc]

The people who access Sharepoint have to have permissions to view the documents on Sharepoint to click from them, but they don’t have to be owners on the Team. I know we have both members and guests who can access the docs ‚Äìwhat I did was I had IT setup Sharepoint so that anybody on the Team can view as the default ‚Äì and then I made sure anybody who was in Workfront linking to Sharepoint was on the Team where the documents are saved. I had to create a separate Team for one vendor and that’s where we save all the docs we need to share with them, and can link to them on WF too.

[Rafal_Bain]

One other thing about SP integration I learned: when creating page on SP you choose basic layout, it's either communication page or teams page. Only one of the layouts can be actually integrated with WF, teams layout if I remember correctly.

[JillAc]

We also do not to use Onedrive to share documents, because they expire, and too many people complain they can’t access. You can control access via Sharepoint company settings, if your IT is willing to spend the time to figure it out.