[Originally appeared 2000.]
The Word of Law column published in Word of Law No. 29 began a series on collaboration. As we begin answering the questions posed in that column, the discussion may seem a bit abstract. Why take two or three columns before describing any specific information about Microsoft Word or other products? The answer lies in the role of system architect described issue 4.48. To make sense of the techniques and the need for tools inside and outside of Microsoft Word, we must have a common understanding of the activities to be supported when drafting collaboratively. Some of these points may seem basic. It doesn’t hurt to remember the basics when trying to accomplish something new or sophisticated. Also, as we look at the behavior of the collaborative tools and techniques, we need to define what we could and should do with them, before we can answer whether they work properly, or what works best.
What activities must be supported when drafting documents collaboratively?
We can distill collaboration to a series of verbs: share, compare, track, review, comment, find, model, reuse. Some of these activities are simple, others subtle. Some require a disciplined community of use in order to function effectively.
SHARE
Nothing could be more basic to collaboration than the notion that more than one person takes responsibility for writing and editing a document. The collaborators may be peers, as Sherry and Bob seek to be in preparing this series. They may consist of a chain of responsibility, such as author, proofreader and editor, or, in the context of law practice, paralegal, associate and partner. Shared responsibility for drafting may also be adversarial. At times, it may appear that lawyers have substituted the printed page for the field of battle. Note that in this description, we leave out author and secretary. This discussion concentrates on shared responsibility for the substance of documents. For this purpose, we will assume that the secretarial role does not include responsibility for the substance of a document, although in real life, the opposite is so often true.
Those who share responsibility for drafting a document must explicitly or implicitly agree on the methods and responsibilities. This used to be much easier. The author (with appropriate secretarial or printing assistance) typed and copied the draft or galleys and distributed them physically to the collaborators. The collaborators made changes by hand markup, or a combination of markup and correspondence suggesting revisions. The author accumulated the suggested or directed changes to produce a revised draft. Today’s electronic document sharing imposes new issues in the sharing process.
Although the concept of sharing is not limited to this meaning, it can be helpful in contrasting “review” activities by thinking about collaboration prior to publication or distribution of a draft document to “third” parties. Prior to distribution, the comments must be assembled into a single complete draft. At this point, the decisions about the methods and extent of markup and other document drafting information must be determined.
COMPARE
For many users, we could complete the story of collaboration at “share and compare.” In a drafting process that requires a series of revisions, the author must display to the rest of the collaborators the changes made between drafts. Text may have been inserted, deleted or moved. Sometimes formatting changes need to be highlighted, particularly if they indicate a change in the structure of a document. Document comparison may also be used forensically. A reviewer or adversary may receive a series of drafts of a document that have not been marked by the author, and wish to determine whether and what changes have been made.
In prehistoric times (sorry, we meant before widespread use of personal computers and contemporary word processing), document comparison required that drafts be marked by hand to show changes. Typically, inserted text was underlined and the locations of deleted text were marked with a carat (^) or other distinctive symbol. The use of red pen for the original markup led to the term “redline” for a document marked in this way, although the lack of color copiers led many of us to call these “blacklined” instead.
Word processing and especially the third party comparison programs have brought us computer generated markup to facilitate document comparison. We will examine these functions thoroughly in this series. For now, let’s focus on what document comparison should accomplish, both from the perspective of the collaborators and the computer. The collaborators need the markup to indicate to each other whether a change has been made in the text and the substance of the change. The markup need to be complete, neither missing the occurrence of changes nor marking unchanged text falsely as changed.
An aspect of this comparison process that receives little discussion might best be called “legibility.” The collaborators must be able to read both current and prior versions of a document clearly, able to follow its substance before and after the changes. The blacklined copy itself can easily lose legibility. If a paragraph includes several insertions and deletions, marked, for instance, in a series of brackets, double underlines and strikeouts, the effort to read either the current version straight through, or the prior version, can take significant mental effort. In Bob’s legal practice, when collaborating with others on the drafting of complex documents, he often distributed both changed pages, marked by manual or machine blacklining, and a clean revised copy of the document. The collaborators or reviewers were assumed to have the prior clean copy of the document. If the drafting were critical enough, the reviewer might work with all three of the blackline, the prior copy and the current copy arrayed on their desk. Microsoft Word offers some of this capability in the options available in its Track Changes feature. We will share concerns about the use of that feature, however, later in this series. DeltaView, the newest of the third party document comparison tools, supports a three pane view of the original document and revised document in their unmarked form, linked on the screen to the blacklined copy.
The issue of legibility helps demonstrate that there is no “perfect” document comparison. The “perfect” text lies in the old and new versions. The comparison, manual or machine, is only a tool for locating and indicating the changes.
TRACK
Word processing, aided and abetted by e-mail and other connectivity, have promoted an expansion and intensification of collaboration, whether in paper distribution and review of drafts or directly in electronic formats As the number of parties involved in a document’s collaboration grows and the expectations for turnaround time of drafts shrink, it has become necessary to manage the tasks and status of collaboration from a work flow perspective. Fully tracking these activities may involve designating a person as an overall sponsor of the document and performing the recordkeeping tasks associated to the parties involved in the documents’ creation, revision and distribution cycles. This function informs, monitors, and generates status surrounding the collective pursuit. Tracking, then, involves all activities associated to managing the document from its project perspective: who has responsibility for what section of the document, what timeframes must be met and what distribution mechanisms must be accommodated.
Conscious decisions need to be made about the level of detail that should be maintained of the document drafting process. The Track Changes feature of Microsoft Word records within the document the time and date on which each change was made and the name Word assigns to the “user” when the editing was made. This may or may not be desirable information to maintain within the document, especially when the electronic form of the document is distributed to adverse persons. It may be desirable to maintain an “audit history” of the document, recording who made what changes at what times.
A key issue in document drafting is when to save a file as a new version. Version control is key to performing document comparisons accurately and to maintaining the integrity of the audit history. At the very least, new versions are required for documents each time they are published and distributed.
REVIEW
It can be valuable to distinguish the review of a distributed or published draft from cooperative editing. A person defined as a reviewer generally will not have responsibility for making or affirming the changes to the proposed draft, especially if there are multiple reviewers. That responsibility will be kept with the document’s author or sponsor. It may be desirable to deliver a document to a reviewer in a form that does not permit them to edit the text, but only to annotate it. While distribution of paper copy without electronic versions suffices, in the electronic world, a similar approach can be accomplished by publishing documents to a non-editable form, such as Adobe Acrobat.
This may not be the best point to pause this discussion, but it has taken up the week’s worth of column space. We will pick up the trail with the Comment activity in the next issue.
This 2000 article originally appeared in Office Watch.Subscribe to Office Watch free at http://www.office-watch.com/.