🙋 Releases: File Lock, Request Forms Update, Approvals in Automations, And More! (12/4/2023)
Feature Updates
- File Lock - Enhanced Control Over Your Files 🔐
We're excited to introduce the ability to lock files, giving you more control and security over your important documents. This feature allows you to restrict future changes to a file, such as renaming, editing, deleting, adding new versions or comments, as well as editing or deleting existing comments and moving files from a task or project.
This feature is available for users on the Business plan and higher, who have the granular permission to "Lock or unlock files". It's applicable for all file types, including external ones.
Users with the necessary permissions can lock and unlock a file or multiple files at once from the Item view's file list, project/folder files view, and while previewing the file.
Locked files can still be opened, previewed, downloaded, compared, copied, added for approval, and uploaded to Digital Assets Management integrations.
- Automation - Approval Trigger 🔄
We're currently enhancing Approvals in Automation, and we're excited to announce the release of a new trigger: "When Approval starts"
This new trigger allows you to:
- Keep track of items when an approval is created for you by adding them to a specific location. For example, you can create a rule like: "When approval starts > And IF it's pending decision, and IF assignee is {user} > Change location."
- Align the statuses of items with approvals. This is particularly useful for gaining transparency into the stage of your task or project, especially since reporting views (Reports, Table view) do not show approval status as a column. You can build a rule like: "When approval starts > Change item's status to Review required."
- Bi-Directional Emails - Streamlined Communication 📧
External requesters can now reply immediately after submitting a form, rather than waiting for a Wrike user to respond first ✨ This new feature allows for instant follow-up questions, making the communication process smoother and more efficient.
- Request Forms - Multiple Answers Conditional Follow-Ups📝
We've expanded the types questions you can add follow-ups to in Request Forms. We previously introduced conditional follow-ups for Single Answer questions, and now, you can set them for Multiple Answers questions as well 🤩 This is just the beginning, and we'll be releasing additional question types soon!
- Users Settings - Gear Button Update ⚙️
We've replaced the "Gear" button in the Users tab with a "Fields" button and a "+" button. The functionality remains the same, but the interface is now more intuitive.
We hope you find these updates helpful in enhancing your productivity and workflow. As always, we're eager to hear your thoughts and feedback, so feel free to share them below 👇
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
These are great updates. Our team will find the ability to lock a document very helpful. The conditional follow-up option for the Request Form is also very useful. I am looking forward to you adding other question type options - currently you just have "paragraph". Thanks!
It's great that you can now set the columns in the user administration. But I miss the "Joined on" field.
New users are transferred via our ActiveDirectory using SSO. I can currently only recognize them by the fact that they are not yet assigned to a group. It would be clearer if the join date could also be displayed in the table.
I am excited about the file lock feature, it is a great addition. It is a little confusing as to why download wasn't part of the lock. That seems like the main reason someone would want to lock a file. In the future it would be nice to be able to choose what aspects of a file should be locked. So when you press the lock button, it pops up a list of options to select for lock.
When will locking PDFs when editing be available? We have many issues where one person is "editing" (using adobe acrobat commenting tools to markup labeling) and another also assigned to review the item also "edits" which causes many conflicts and lost comments. We CANNOT use the Wrike commenting as we are in a Med Device company and need to show redlines of all changes in our quality management system.
Very excited by the file lock feature and something our design team will find very helpful! We have had many instances where the team are making edits to a design file and the client will continue to add comments. One thing that would be great would be if comments can still be "resolved" while in lock mode. Our design team resolve each comment as they go to ensure they action all edits required. But this is great! Also excited for the addition of multiple answers conditional follow-Ups on request forms.
Thank you for your feedback, everyone! We made our Product team aware of it 🤗
Jeanine Lore Apologies if I misunderstood, but it's already possible to lock PDF files in Wrike with this release.
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa PDFs do not lock when using the 'edit' function. We frequently have issues where person A selects a pdf, then selects 'edit'. While they are reviewing the pdf and applying comments in Acrobat, person B then goes into the wrike task, selects the file and selects 'edit', then it opens in Acrobat and they start adding comments. When person A finishes editing, they save and close within Acrobat which then updates the pdf in Wrike. When person B is finished and they save and close in Acrobat, the get an error that basically gives a number of things that could have happened (I don't have a screenshot at the moment). Then they must go to their desktop where the file they were editing was saved, and open the file in Wrike for editing again and transfer the comments from the file that was on their desktop to the file in Wrike. Then save and close in Acrobat. Presuming no one else opened and closed the pdf for editing, the file is then updated in Wrike. Most of the time people just ignore the popup not realizing their comments were not saved. I just have to either hope I notice that they happened to comment in the task that they had changes, then I look to see what was added for comments in the pdf on that day. We just had this issue happen last week, or maybe the week before, so unless it's a fix that has just been made, it is not fixed.
Jeanine Lore An option might be to have your team use the Wrike Approval features instead of leaving comments in Acrobat. You can comment the same way, right on the document, and multiple people can be reviewing at the same time. I've never had an issue using the Wrike tool when multiple people are reviewing simultaneously. Then whoever needs to make the edits can mark the comments resolved right in the review window and know exactly how many edits you still need to make and then everything is all together in the task - the status, approvers, edits, attachments, etc. I've worked on multiple teams now that didn't use Acrobat for review and only relied on Wrike and it's always worked well.
Jessie Stith unfortunately that won't work for us. We work in a regulated industry that requires showing the history of changes via a 21CFRpart11 validated change control system. For us that means that we must show the changes made to a document from one revision to the next and showing those changes is via our validated electronic document management system. For labeling, as is my use case, it means adding "redlines" to a pdf of the current effective labeling artwork which is achieved via Adobe Acrobat commenting tools that shows the user that added the change comment as well as the date they added it. That "redline" pdf is then paired with the new "blackline" of the label, which is another pdf of the labeling with the changes made, then routed in our EDMS for approval and release. This is standard across industries where documented change tracking is required for labeling control.
Jeanine Lore Makes sense! If you are still trying to manage the task/review process in Wrike, and if the same people need to review every time, instead of sending to everyone all at once could you automate review for one person at a time as part of the workflow? When the review is completed, it could automatically move to the next status and assign a different person to review. This would avoid multiple people reviewing at the same time and keep your PDF change tracking process intact. Notifications are fairly immediate for approvals, so it doesn't seem like it would slow things down too much and could be a good workaround?
Jessie Stith that would be an alternative and I appreciate the suggestion but that would increase our possible review time from 3 days to possibly 18 days since I must give each reviewer 3 days to review so they can manage with other priorities. And unfortunately many of them wait until the end of the 3rd day to complete their tasks with a few always going longer. I also thought of them locking the file with the new "lock" feature, then downloading and editing, then unlocking and versioning but there are two issues with that. #1 I don't know that a collaborator has the rights to do that and #2, the biggy, most have trouble following instructions we already have regarding reviews and many are not the best with computer software. I just wish the locking when editing worked on pdfs like it does for other documents like Word and Excel. I just don't get why it doesn't.
Thanks a lot for the detailed feedback Jeanine Lore, I'm sending it to the respective team 👍
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover