PageProof Academy: Master workflows for seamless collaboration

Hi everyone, it's Marcus from PageProof, and we're all here today to learn how to master workflows. I've got a lot of tips and tricks for you today, so let's get started. Okay, so let's just jump over and take a look at the first of the screens that we're going to look at, which is when we upload a proof. So I'm going to start by going and choosing a PDF, and then we go to the proof setup screen inside of PageProof. We're not going to focus too much about the detail on this screen. I will point out a couple of things over on the right-hand side before we go into the reviewers and go into the workflows. Couple of things to note here. The owners, which are the people that are uploading the proof and managing the proof, you can add as many owners as you like. Owners being people who are managing the proof, not people who are reviewing the proof. So make sure you don't put your customers in his owner's. So that is tip number 1. And then down here, and we'll do another session on this, another PageProof Academy session, checklists. So if you haven't looked at checklists, do check them out. They enable you to add a checklist in your proofing screen so people can mark off as they go through proofing your work. But let's take a look at workflows. That's why we're here. So at the top, you'll see I've got the reviewers area and it says add reviewers. Now if I click onto this menu, pops down and it shows me a set of options here. So I've got new workflow, which is the place that we're going to go to start to go through the essentially the session on workflows. But just make a note below that you can see my templates. So these are the workflow templates that I have created previously. And then below that, we can see Shared with Me. And Shared with Me, these are all the workflow templates that other members of my team have made available for me to use. Okay, so that is how this menu is shown. Now, if I go up to the top here and go New Workflow, this will take us to the first of the steps, which is The final step. So the final step, this is the final approver. Who is the person who makes the ultimate decision on your proof? And in this case, I'm going to choose— we'll just choose Gemma and add her in here. Now, the final approver, that can be one of many people. In the case of a client, direct client relationship, this will be your client.. And this will be the person who ultimately gives the approval on the piece of work. If you are in an agency-style environment, the final approver may be the account manager who is responsible for the work going through a particular account. And if you are in an internal team and you're working closely with an internal marketing team and you are working in the design agency for your internal marketing team, this is either going to be the marketing manager or someone in charge there, or it might be you. You might be the person who ultimately gives the final sign-off on the work. So I'm going to run through several scenarios here where I'm going to pretend to press the Send Proof button, but I'm going to explain each time what happens when I do that. So right now, if I go down the bottom and I clicked on Send Proof, that would send this proof out. Gemma would receive an email invitation, she'd be able to click through from the email invitation, be able to mark up the work, either give an approval or send back a to-do list. Okay, so that is the scenario that we see in front of us right now. Now to add to this, I'm going to go up the top here and click on Add Step. And with this step addition, I'm going to give the step a name. So I'm going to call this Marketing. And here I am going to put in Shana, and I'm going to put in Roy. Now you'll notice that it's automatically filling in these names as I type. And the reason it does that is because in my profile, I have got under address book, I have listed all the people that I interact with for, for putting in those names. So these automatically go in here as you type them into the fields in PageProof., it will put them into this address book for you, which is handy. That's great. This is your personal address book in PageProof. And you can import those by clicking on the plus symbol up here. And then you're able to type in email addresses. Or if you're using Apple Mail or Outlook, or you've got some sort of list, a comma-separated list of email addresses, you can just paste that entire list into this field, click Add, and it will bulk add people into your personal address book. So the address book, that's kind of tip number 1. That means it's a sort of a superpower that you can, that you can pick up on and make sure that you've got people inside of here. If you have people that have left your organization, you can also remove them from your address book for those email addresses that come up. Or if you've typed an email address by mistake, you can come into your address book, and you're able to go through and curate that. Okay, so let's come back to our workflow. So you can see here, I have a step that says marketing. And I have a final approver step. Now, these, if I press the send proof button right now, it would send email to Shana, Roy, and Gemma, it sends email to 3 people. All of them will be able to come in and leave feedback, and they can all go through and make their decisions. And the reason for that is because Sharna and Roy are in the workflow as reviewers, and reviewers are the basic role inside of PageProof, and it allows them to leave feedback on the work. Alright. Now, I've just realized, actually, I need to get the feedback from Sharna and Roy before it goes to Gemma. So I go up to these three dots on the side here and I change the role of Sharna to mandatory. That's because Sharna's our head of marketing and I need her decision before it moves on to the next step. So taking that same scenario again, I go down and I click on send proof. It's going to send email to Sharna and Roy, it's going to stop. And it's going to wait for Sharna to make a decision because she is mandatory. However, Sharna and Roy can both leave comments. They can both interact with the proof. But PageProof is waiting for Sharna because she is the mandatory in this step. Now, another change, I'm going to make Roy mandatory. And I'm also going to add in Janson into this proof as well. So with this change, you can see I have two mandatories in the step in the marketing team. So if I clicked on the Send Proof button, Shana, Roy, Janson will all receive email invitations, and then PageProof stops. And it waits for both Shana and Roy to make their decision. And the reason I know that is because at the bottom of the step, you'll see it says All mandatory decisions. Now, that means I need both people to give me their decision before it moves to Gemma in the final step. But this is a button, so I can click it and it will toggle it to one mandatory decision, which means now I just need a decision from Sharna or Roy for it to move on to the next step. Okay, so you can switch how many people you need. Either one or all of the mandatories are required for it to move on to the next step. Now you'll notice here, I have down here the inviter role. So this inviter role currently is showing a little gray icon. The inviter role is there so that people can invite others. So this means that it doesn't have to come back to you as the proof owner. You can say, hey, Sharna, you're allowed to add other people to the workflow. So you can make people the inviter, just simply turn that on, it goes green. And now that means that Shana and Roy can now add in email addresses into this workflow. Alright, so that gives them the ability to make changes to the workflow. So you can give that out if you want to. Now, one thing I will also point out here, if you want to add more people into the step, but you want to make them a mandatory by default with the inviter role turned on and you don't want to go to the menu every single time. Tip number 2, tip number 2, this is a great one. So you can go in with no email address set. If you set it to mandatory or the role that you wanted, switch on what you need here as you type in email addresses now. So if I go in and type in an email address, the next one will automatically be set to that. So all you need to do is type in multiple email addresses now and it will inherit inherit the permissions that you set from the one above. So that's a great tip. Tip number 2, really great way of adding multiple people in. Now, let's go and add another step. So let's go up the top and add in here our creative director. So I'm going to say creative, and inside of here, I'm going to put Clark. And Clark is our creative director. And Clark, I'm going to make a gatekeeper. So again, if we think about pressing the send proof button, the proof will go to Clark. Clark, because Clark is a gatekeeper, Clark is able to essentially gate the proof. So if Clark wants changes made, he is able to mark up the changes and send a to-do list back to the owners of the proof. So this is a really big thing when it comes to these workflows, because mandatories can make a decision, but the proof just carries on down. A gatekeeper can say, stop here, I need these changes made. So the gatekeeper can turn the proof around and send it back to the owners so they can make those changes. Now, once they've made those changes, they will upload version 2 of the proof. And with all page proof workflows, when you upload a new version, it will start at the very top of the workflow again. It'll come into Clark for the second time, and Clark will say, hmm, these changes look great. I think this is wonderful. And there's a button there where he can go approve and send on, and then it will go into the marketing step of the proof for the very first time. Okay, now, thing you should note at this point. The people that are in the marketing step and below, they will only see and have access to version 2 of the proof. Why? Well, that's because version 1 was stopped by Clark and sent back as a to-do list. So it was only version 2 that was released by Clark into the next step. So they will only see version 2. And this is a great way of making sure that if you have people in, in the second steps and beyond that you don't want to see comments back and forth, back and forth with creative team, this is the style of workflow you can use in order to achieve that. Now, tip number 3, this is a great one. So sometimes when you upload a new version, you might decide Hey, we might skip the creative step for this time. You know, so you'll notice there's a little green dot up here and it says the workflow will start here. Well, actually, if you move your cursor down below here, you can start it here. So if I click, it now says we're going to start the workflow at this point, which is a great way of making sure that although Clark will be involved in the proof, he will no longer receive an email invitation. And we're essentially not too worried about his decision at this point. So he still gets visibility on it, but can't make a decision. And you'll see at the top here, there's a little skip icon. So it says this step will be skipped. So hovering over it will give you exactly the information you need to know about this. Now, tip number 4. Again, this is something that you can see right in front of you, but you may not have accessed beside each one of these steps, there is a due date. So you can set a due date per step. And you can go through and set those up. And this is a great way of giving the person— people inside the step exactly what they need to know deadline-wise for their step. So do go set those due dates per step as well to inform those people in the, in the workflow exactly when they need to get to the work. So I'm pretty happy with this workflow. I think this workflow looks great. And I don't want to have to reset this up every time I upload a proof. So at the top of the screen next to the menu, you can see there are 3 dots here. With these 3 dots, you can click and say save as a new workflow template. So I can say that this is our creative Production Workflow Template. So I'm just going to save this into our workflow template. So that now saves it, and that will appear in our workflow templates area and can be used. And you'll notice that it's got the name at the top there now, so that I'm able to do that. Now, tip, tip number 5 that I'm going to show you now is, hey, we've got somebody in the marketing team that really should be in the creative team. How do I move somebody? So something to note, you can drag and drop users between steps. So I can simply move Marcus up to here, set Marcus as a gatekeeper as well. And now you can see my creative team is made up of 2 people. And in this particular case, I'm going to say only one of them was required to move the proof on. So you might have 2 creative directors. You don't know which one is going to give you the okay. So you can put them both into the step. And you can set this decision to one gatekeeper decision. Now what I would say is gatekeepers, do keep them in a step by themselves, that is recommended because of their ability to send back changes. We do say keep the gatekeepers isolated and keep them together so that they're able to, to make those decisions without disrupting the rest of your workflow. So you can have a gatekeeper step here, you can add another one down here, you can keep on doing whatever you like with the page proof workflows. So what I'm going to do now is we're going to jump across and take a look at the workflow templates area. So you access this by going up to your menu at the top of the screen and coming down to workflows. And this will show you your workflow templates. So this will give you everything you need in terms of all the view that you've got of the of the templates that you are in charge of. So you can see those showing up inside of here. So you can see there is our Creative Production one showing up now. And you'll note at the top, Shared with me. So this is a way you can look at all of the templates that have been shared with you. So some things to do inside of My Templates. First thing to note, as you hover over each one of these, there's a little star at the top. And this is where you can favorite your workflow templates and it will pop them to the top of the menu. So they're available there for you to choose very quickly when you're uploading proofs. You can just move your favorites up. So that creative production one, I love it. We're going to use it again and it's going to be one of my favorites. So it'll go to the, now to the top of my list of workflow templates. The other thing to note also is clicking into any of these workflow templates. You'll see over on this, this view, we give you information here telling you what's going to happen when the proof arrives into these steps. It's a good way of getting a descriptive view of exactly how the workflows are going to perform. So you can do that in here if you want to as well. But one thing I want to show you, and this is, you know, another tip shared with So you can share your workflow templates from inside of the workflow template area, and this lets you do it in two ways. First way is you can share it with everybody in your team. So if you switch the switch on here, that will now share this workflow template with absolutely everybody in your team. They will all see it in their menu under the Shared With area. So that's how you share templates with absolutely everybody. If you want to share the templates with certain people, and this happens inside of agencies, particularly where you might have one team looking after one car brand and another team looking after a different car brand. So what you can do as an example is just nominate the people who can see that this workflow down the bottom here. So you can just add in email addresses of the account managers, for example, who are allowed to see this template. And in other templates, you can nominate different people. So this is what you can use for more granular control of who can see and use the templates. And I will also note here, can edit template. What this does, and if I put in someone else here, for example, can edit template, you have this switched on if you want to give Janson the ability to change your template. So you don't want to give everybody this ability. And in this case, Clark, I'm not going to give the edit ability. Clark can still use this template. So this is how you can use the sharing to share templates to certain teams or share to your entire team. This is how you're able to do that inside of PageProof. Okay, so what we're going to take a look at next is when you do go to your menu and we upload a proof. So I'm just going to essentially just go through and look at what happens with that favorite. So let's just go back to no workflow. I come back in, we click on this, and you'll see under Favorites, there is my Creative Production template. It's moved up into the new Favorites area that you see here inside of my PageProof workflow templates menu. And that same favoriting works inside the Adobe add-on as well. So if you're using the PageProof Adobe add-on, then you're able to see your favourites popping up to the top of your workflow templates as well. So you've done all this work with workflow templates. This is where now the templates are in use. What is it that you get out of that when it comes to looking at your proof tiles? So you'll notice on my proof tile here, this one that says 14 comments, the press add visuals may, this is showing me the decisions. So I can see the individual decisions of the people in my workflow. So you can click on these to see what people think and what they want to do there with my, with my proof. But on the end, this little circle that you see here, in this case, it's colored green. If it's falling behind, it'll be red. But if I click onto this, it's showing me 1 of 3. So if I click, it's showing me we are at step 1 of 3 in our workflow. It's currently the marketing step. And here's the due date for that marketing step. So you can see that's been set. And it's telling me that 66% of the reviewers have been invited. So this is a really great way of getting a summary. And again, clicking into here will give you information that's useful. Also, another tip here on the end, you see these three dots, if you click on that, you can skip people in the workflow step, which will mean that they'll get a notification about, about getting, getting on— sorry, this will move that on to the next stage of the workflow. So These are some of the actions you can take directly from inside of these menus if you want to as well.