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I am currently managing a project with writers, Content Reviewers, and Editors.

The documents are stored on Google Drive. At the moment the process is very convoluted and is quickly becoming a bottle neck. I will describe the process below.

  • Author puts article up in specified folder -I email review team, asking them to review, wait for email back confirming it has been done
  • I move to Language checks, wait for email back confirming it has been done
  • I send it off to be published

This involves emails back and forth and is a drain.

I need a tool that can manage the process, i.e., I can add states for a task such as, in review, in edit, published. Also this tool needs to be able to be collaborative so everyone involved in the end-to-end process can login to one central place do their tasks. etc.

It should also integrate with Google Drive. As I come from a software engineering background, I was going to try and write some myself. But there is no point re-inventing the wheel.

Has anyone got any suggestions of tools out there?

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  • Can't you just use notes in Google Docs? I don't use it so I don't know if it even has that; but if it does you can just add notes with status updates and the like. You can also have a doc that's never deleted or renamed, list the to-do points and their statuses; everyone updates it as necessary. No SW addon solutions I'm aware of.
    – Mussri
    Jul 5, 2013 at 1:10
  • I think that it will be impossible to find the tool which works with Google Drive as it is not unique and it is a separate tool itself. I think you shoyld take another tool and ask people to work with it. As for the tool, there are too many of them e.g. Comindware, Montis, Bugzilla and many others.
    – user24968
    Aug 13, 2013 at 6:48
  • Possibly helpful: Looking for a general-use cloud-hosted document management webapp
    – Goodbye Stack Exchange
    Aug 15, 2013 at 14:51

3 Answers 3

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The problem is that the solutions I know are mainly related to web - namely CMS - and I think it would be to overpowered to use then just to manage reviewing process. In any case, eZ Publish is an outstanding. Sharepoint works also but - imho - it's not so good and quite expensive.

There are some more obscure solutions - like using BitBucket and GIT - but I don't think it's worth to suggest them in the context of project management.

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  • Actually, I think you have something there with revision control systems (I prefer TortoiseSVN though). The author can commit an article, the review team can see the commit, pull the article and review it, commit their changes with the comment "reviewed", for example, then the publisher can just pull the newest version and publish it. If you could get notifications every time someone commits something, even better (there's a tool called CommitMonitor that monitors Apache Subversion repositories for new commits, for example). Plus, it keeps track of who changed what and why.
    – Tannalein
    Jul 5, 2013 at 13:51
  • That's what I use for my writings. I write the text and commit. The reviewer checks the text, and commits. Everybody that has the web repository is automatically notified on every change. I didn't suggest that because it won't work so well for binary files and a lot of people loves to write with MS Word. I use plain text.
    – Psicofrenia
    Jul 5, 2013 at 14:13
  • I've switched to plain text as well. If the articles are going to be published online (which is not specified here) plain text files would be a lot less PITA to put on a web page. Even for paper publishing, if the graphics designer is using, for example, InDesign, then Word formatting is useless to him, even bothersome to get rid of. If there are no pictures, tables or graphs in the article, I'd recommend some lightweight markup language and some nice, plain text files :)
    – Tannalein
    Jul 5, 2013 at 15:27
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    Indeed that would be my choice also ;-) One thing I learn in some years working with CMS development and administration, is that editors love to use offline MS Word and import the .doc file to the online CMS. Most CMS have such functionality. Not something I use would do myself but, people have a tremendous capacity of resist change and learn new things, even if so simple as Markdown. ;-)
    – Psicofrenia
    Jul 5, 2013 at 15:37
  • That's true, unfortunately.
    – Tannalein
    Jul 5, 2013 at 15:40
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This is totally self promotion, but I'd like to think what I'm working on addresses your problem. The only thing missing is a choice list for task states, but everything else I think would be covered. And heck, we busily adding features so you may see a choice list for status real soon.

Basically it works with Google Sites, which gives you data encapsulation per project. You can link one or more documents to each task. You can assign tasks to one or more people. And, you can view one or more project at a time. Let me know what you think.

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I've worked with ProofHQ for collaborative proofing and approvals, and it's worked well particularly for distributed teams.

For general project management I've used Trello, which has a nice paradigm of progressing tasks through a series of stages and assigning particular people to them.

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