Better File Sharing with Social Documents

Preview documents and add comments before you download.

Social documents is a feature that you can use to share files and comments with multiple people in CubeTree. It improves on existing file sharing by giving you file preview and visual commenting capabilities. File preview lets you browse through the pages in a document and visual commenting was inspired by John Madden using his Telestrator to mark up football re-plays on national TV.

We added social documents because existing file sharing in most products only let you upload a file and share a link, which isn't very useful for collaboration. You have to download the file before you can look at it to make sure you have the right one. If you want to comment or share edits, you have to make those in the document itself or send an email to a list of collaborators. Neither one is very visible to the group of people trying to work together on it. Making comments in a document that you can only see after you download it also makes version management an issue; collaborators never know for sure if they have the most current version with all the comments.

Social documents is a better way of file sharing because it keeps a single master copy in one place that is always updated with the latest comments in real time, not one that is floating around in people's email. Its also a great way to share best practices between different users. Imagine an inside sales person adding comments about the sales win that worked for an account to the 'customer logo' page in the corporate presentation. Now all the sales people have access to that specific success story when they are using the deck for their next call.

Social documents completely changes the notion of working on a shared document by giving users two powerful collaboration capabilities right inside of CubeTree: file preview and visual commenting.

File preview

The first thing we did to improve file sharing was to add file preview for most documents (PDF, Word, Excel, Powerpoint) so you can flip through all uploaded files quickly to find just the ones you need. The second thing we did was to include two kinds of previews, thumbnails and full page views. Thumbnails help you find specific content within a large document while its still online. And full page views are large enough that you can read individual pages online and then add your comments. It makes it simple to search through many documents quickly and easier to find the ones you need.

Visual commenting

You already have visual commenting in CubeTree for photos. Now you can use visual commenting with Files too. To add a visual comment you simply select an area on a document, preview and type in your remarks.

Your comment appears as a callout on the document over the part of the page you want to highlight. For example you can pick out the 3rd bullet on slide 3 in a PowerPoint presentation and make a comment about how 'this seems wrong' or how a 'customer loves this point'. That comment then is visible on the page to anyone else who looks at this file. It also appears in your company's CubeTree feed or @feed to notify co-workers who are collaborating on the document.

Using social documents is a better and faster way to share and collaborate on documents and presentations in CubeTree. Watch them in action on the video below.