Over the last couple of months we’ve been working hard on improving, adding to and polishing colaab and are happy to announce that we have a new release available as of now. This release combines both a host of small improvements and bug fixes with some major new functionality. Here’s the lowdown on what’s in this release.

Comment statuses and the actions tab

One request that consistently came up from our users was the ability to work with comments in a more efficient manner. While they were finding the comments themselves great, they found that when working with lots of comments over many resources things got a little hard to keep track of. To address this we’ve added two major new pieces of functionality.

Comment Statuses

Now when you add a comment to a resource you can set the status for the comment. The status defaults to “New”. Comments can have the following statuses:

New – the comment has been newly added

Requires Action – the comment requires actioning, we intend to allow you to pick a user it requires actioned by in future.

Completed – the subject of the comment has been completed, but the comment is still relevant.

Archived – the comment is no longer relevant, we intent to allow you to hide all archived comments from view in future.

The Actions Tab

Comment statuses work hand in hand with the new Actions Tab. This tab shows you a list of comments which you can use to drive your colaab use. This list is filtered by status (which you can change using the drop down, default is to showing comments with status of either “New” or “Requires Action”) and can be ordered by Date in descending order or ascending order by clicking the calendar button.

The list shows all the comments relevant to your current location so:

When you are at the Dashboard – displays a list of all comments in all workspaces you have access to. Clicking on “view –>” takes you directly to the comment.

When you are inside a workspace – displays a list of all comments in all resources within the workspace. When you roll over a comment the resource it is within will highlight. Clicking on “view –>” takes you directly to the comment.

 When you are inside a resource – displays a list of all comments for the current resource. When you roll over a comment the comment will highlight if it is currently viewable. Clicking on “view –>” takes you directly to the comment.

We’ve been testing out comment statuses and the actions tab for a couple of weeks now and are finding it dramatically improves the efficiency of collaborating over resources using colaab.

Sharing and download added to resource view

We had some user feedback that it was quite difficult to find the sharing and download dialog for a resource, which were currently only available through the globe icon on the resource in the resource list. We’ve surfaced this functionality much more easily by adding a “Share and download” button to the main toolbar when within a resource.

Sharing options allow you to access the public url for a resource (the workpsace must be marked as public), download the resource, and send the public url to a friend

Manage workspace from within workspace

Much in the same way as sharing and download, we received feedback that the “Manage Workspace” function could be difficult to find. (It was, and still is, accessible from the “Manage Workspace” button on a Workspace in the Workspace List). To resolve this issue we’ve added another link to this functionality from the main title bar when you are inside a workspace.

Manage workspace allows you to change the name and public / private setting for a workspace, manage existing users, including changing their role and resending their invite email and invite more users.

Scroll-wheel support for zooming

There were a lot of votes for this feature internally, so zooming in and out of a resource now supports the mouse’s scroll-wheel. Here’s a quick video that show’s this off, with the initial navigation to the comment coming from clicking on “view –>” in the new actions panel.

Comment borders

You’ll also notice that new comments now have a green border around them. This fades slowly from green to gray over the course of 7 days so that you can easily scan a resource for the latest activity.

Tweaks and bug fixes

In addition to the features outlined above we’ve also fixed or implemented around 200 bugs or small user experience tweaks, so the whole experience of using colaab should be even faster, smoother and easier. We’re really happy and excited about this latest release. If you’d like to try it now, simply sign up for free.