The Shortlist Episode 83: The Short(er) List: Adobe Share for Review

In this episode, Becky and Melissa spotlight one of the most underrated gems in the proposal world: Adobe Share for Review—the live-PDF reviewing tool that keeps your team organized without derailing your sanity. Between enthusiastic SFR praise and some truly premium BlueBeam shade (sorry to all you BlueBeam lovers out there; but fear not, you will be represented on the pod soon), the duo walks through how this simple tool can turn a chaotic review process into organized bliss. Think tidy comment panels, @ mentions that actually work, and the sheer joy of resolving a markup with one satisfying click.

They also share their best hot tips, workflow hacks, and wise advice for helping even the most hesitant reviewers embrace the magic of SFR. Tune in to see how SFR can make your reviews collaborative, efficient, and—most importantly—painless.

Podcast Transcript

Welcome to The ShorterList. Hi, I'm Becky Ellison from The Shortlist Podcast, and I am going rogue.

Apparently some things are just too silly, weird or extra to fit into our regular Shortlist episode, so we are bringing those conversations, rants and other fun stuff that was too spicy for TV.

Direct to you in bite-sized little podcast treats, hosted by me and featuring all of your favorite Middle Sixers. Joining me today is Melissa Richie, and I also stole our producer, Kyle Davis. Hey, Melissa.

Hey, Kyle.

Hey, Becky.

He's real. I swear he's real. He's waving.

I saw him wave.

I saw it.

He's not figment of my imagination.

I will sound terrible, but if it makes you happy, I will splice myself in from the team's recording.

Thanks. Thanks for splicing yourself, Kyle. He's a great producer, everybody.

Best in the business. So today we are talking about Adobe Share for review, which if you don't know what that is, who, boy, are we about to change your life?

Let's see if we can explain what that is, how it works, talk about some of the pros and cons, you know, just get right into it. Melissa, how are you doing, first of all? How has your week been?

How are we feeling?

Feeling good. It's been a pretty good week, got lots of workouts in, you know, can't complain about that.

Working out. She's a go-getter. I'm not a person who I think ever in my life has said that I have gotten some workouts in, or however you phrase that.

I don't know. I am a living room Pilates kind of girl, and it's supposedly three times a week, but we'll see.

Okay, so getting into our topic, I'm going to stay on task this time, I promise. Listeners, we're talking about Adobe Share for Review.

If our listeners don't know what that is, have never heard of it, how would we explain what is Adobe Share for Review?

It is essentially a live PDF that people can comment on.

So it is super helpful to get multiple people giving you comments on your draft of your proposal, of your ad you designed, whatever you have that who doesn't have to get collaboration or input or buy off from other people when they're working on

something as a marketer in this industry. So it is one of those tools in your Adobe Creative Cloud membership subscriptions that if you're not using, you should be.

For sure. That's a great explanation. Basically, everybody knows how you make something you export it to PDF, you send out a draft, and then you get comments from people.

They do it every which way they could possibly do it. Some people will go in and make actual little comments. Other people will print it out and write all over it with a Sharpie, scan it back into you.

Some people, you never know what you're going to get. They might run it through a BlueBeam chaos. But with Adobe Share for review, of course, you can go straight to the document and you share it to the cloud, Adobe's cloud, which then puts it online.

Anyone can access it from just an Internet browser and make their comments. So this can be done either from directly out of InDesign, which can be a little bit touchy. The connection is not always great there.

Sometimes things lag. We don't necessarily recommend going straight from InDesign. Although there is an advantage there that you can update the InDesign document and it will then update the Share for review link, which is nice.

But again, the lag can be pretty problematic. So we typically recommend that people export the PDF first and then hit that Share button, which creates a link. And you can then send that link out to people and comment it.

So obviously there is more than one way to do sort of an online based document sharing for review. Melissa, what method do you prefer and why?

Well, since we are all Adobe Creative Cloud users here at Middle of Six, and that has been my AEC marketing career, and I've been at this long enough that Adobe was the only PDF document reader, editor.

If you've been in this industry a while, you may have had those days before BlueBeam Review came. What it was now, the engineers have their own document commenting on PDFs. So...

Boo!

Right?

So yeah, I'm an Adobe user day in and day out, so I want to stay within the Adobe world. And it's not just for the company that's making it, but I find that the organization of the commenting is a lot cleaner. There's one side panel that pops up.

All the comments are in order. It tells you what page it's on. And then it's real easy to click and resolve a comment.

You can reply to a comment in there. You can app mention someone in the comment so they get it. So it's pretty streamlined for me, like BlueBeam Studio Sessions Review.

It feels chaotic for a document. If you've ever had someone take your PDF of your proposal draft and take it into BlueBeam Review and comment on it, I find it real chaotic. There's clouding with comments and arrows, and just it's chaos.

And so my brain, it's just a little much. And then trying to resolve the comments, to me, there's a different way that I'm not aware of. It feels like it's like four clicks to resolve a comment, and then they never go away.

You can't make them go away. So it just always feels really chaotic. So they're kind of the upsides for me on the Share for Review.

Some men just want to watch the world burn.

Word, I like BlueBeam, I can't even deal with it. I like the comments are always off in the pasteboard and you can't even get to them.

Oh, yes.

You can't copy the text. You can't find I've never even tried to resolve a comment. I don't even know where they are.

Like there's so many windows. There's tiny little skinny little windows that you have to try to scroll up and down to be able to read the stuff. It's like they hate their users.

Who knows why that's the preferred method for engineers everywhere. We'll get into that later. But we definitely recommend Adobe Share for Review because it's so streamlined like that.

Exactly like you. The comments are in order. You click on them and it goes right to the page.

You can copy the text right out of the comment. It is a hands-on InDesign user's dream to just take those edits right out of the Share for Review and then make them in InDesign.

Some hot tips. Let's see, what do we got to get the best performance out of Share for Review? We already said about you probably want to export to PDF first and then hit Share.

You mentioned marking completed comments as resolved. That's good, because then you can filter by...

If you go up to the little filter icon, you can filter the comments by resolved or not resolved or whatever as you're going, so that every time you tick something off as resolved, it disappears and then you have list to focus on.

Yeah, and you can even sort the comments by who made them. So, that's kind of handy if you're in a meeting and Bob says, I made a bunch of comments, you go and like, oh, Bob.hays at construction.com and there's his comments. Cool.

Got it. See them or nope. I don't know what happened.

I don't see them.

Yeah, that does sometimes happen. Comments are disappearing. Oh, it's Bob the superintendent keeps coming up.

He's the guy who does the chili cook off, I think. We've made up this, never mind. This is like Shortlist lore listeners for those who've been with us for a while.

We've been talking about Bob the superintendent forever.

These are a lot of cool little things that may not be super obvious when you first go in there, but you can, yeah, you can at tag people, and it will, I think, for most people, it will actually send them an email and be like, you got mentioned,

better get on it. BlueBeam can't do that. You can even link to comments.

If you're conversing with somebody outside of the document, you can copy the link to the actual comment and send somebody directly to what Bob said, so that you can resolve whatever issues he's always bringing up.

And there's even a couple different ways you can invite people to collaborate on the document. You can get the link and share that out, like send an email to everybody. Here's the link to the share for review.

You can within the Adobe document, invite people via their email in there.

So maybe you already sent out that email link and then you're in the meeting and someone else needs to review it and just on the fly, you can invite them by their email address in the document.

So you kind of have some multiple ways to get people in there collaborating.

Nice. Yeah. And as we said, like you don't need an Adobe account to be able to comment on these things, which is what makes it great because you can just send it to anybody, clients, people outside of your firm, whatever, and they just hit that link.

And as long as they have an internet connection, they can get in there, make the comments. But it helps to create an Adobe account because then it's easier to sign in. It'll have your name.

You can even put your little picture in there. It'll ping you. It'll go straight to your email.

It'll have all that stuff in there so that you can make sure not to miss anything going forward if this becomes your workflow. We do have a lot of various clients who don't have much Adobe experience.

We always try to gently and lovingly push Adobe Share for review as an alternative to BlueBeam. And sometimes we get people who don't know what's going on. They're kind of freaked out.

What are some ways that we can make it easier for reviewers who might not be super tuned in to Adobe?

Usually, when I send out a Share for review link, I always put the slow caveat.

Just click the link. It will open in a browser and you can make comments. In other words, don't save locally, because if people are used to using BlueBeam to comment on things, their inclination might to be to download it so they can comment on it.

So I usually put that out there right off the bat. So that's clear.

People sometimes are like, if you're in the document actively making the markups as they're writing them and you resolve them, depending on your settings, it can look like the comments disappeared.

So sometimes I hear that like, I was making comments but things are disappearing. It's like, well, it's because we are down to the wire on this one. So I am making the edits while the person is commenting.

But again, it's another view setting. You can change it where you can filter by resolved or unresolved. So it's just a little bit of user education.

Did you find the files?

I don't even know what they look like. What do they look like?

They're in the computer.

They're in the computer?

Yeah, one sneaky thing that we have tried here is if we've got people who just for whatever reason, they're seeing disappearing comments, we're worried about filtering, we will kind of work around is you can add a reaction.

Like there's a little sparkly smiley face emoji thing that you can press to. You can put an emoji if you would like to do that, if that's your path in life.

Or like one of the little choices is a little checkbox, which we sometimes will put on there so that the person on the other end, if they are having difficulty seeing comments, showing up, whatever, they'll see that little checkbox and they'll know,

okay, well, this has been done. And that way it doesn't affect the filtering. So even if they are filtering everything out, it'll stay there and they still know that it got done. Little workarounds.

Adobe is wonderful. There's no way BlueBeam has a checkbox anyway, sorry. We're going to talk about BlueBeam later in the season.

And it's going to be cathartic, I know.

Another thing is if you are doing multiple drafts, like you'd use the color system, red, gold, final reviews, when you do the share for review, when you create the link, it uploads it to your Creative Cloud account or to your business Creative Cloud

account. You can then take it off the cloud.

So if you have problems with people going back to an old version, so that is something we've been kind of implementing more recently of, okay, red draft commenting is closed, we pull it off the cloud, we download it.

So then we have that saved to our server locally. And then the next one goes up, gold draft is up, that's on the cloud. And now that's the one everyone gets to comment on.

I don't think I've ever done that, Melissa.

I think my Adobe cloud is full of documents.

I just started doing that recently.

Oh, wow. I wonder if there's like a data ceiling that I am going to start getting like nasty grams, like you get from Google, like your emails are full.

It's a fun trip down memory lane, Becky. You can just go back and see proposals in days past and years past. I went through and did a little cleanup.

17 drafts, 17.

Oh, no, I do a lot of drafts. So I think my Adobe Cloud is probably the worst one here. To say nothing for my email storage, never mind.

Yeah, no, no, no.

Let's not talk about that.

You've got mail.

Dude, this thing claims I have mail.

It's amazing what we can do with computers these days.

Dude, now I'm reading it.

Well, wow, that was a fun journey. I was very happy to go on that trip with you and listeners. If you can hear me, please write in to our social media.

Let us know if there's anything you'd like to hear us talk about on The Shortlist, because you know us, we'll talk about anything. We're like that. Rate, subscribe, remember to share the love.

Make a friend. Recommend the podcast to another AEC marketer who wants to feel seen because we see you. We love you and we are you.

See you next time where we will probably start a fight with another software company. Who else upsets us? Dropbox?

No, they're okay. Yeah, this was fun. Thanks, everybody.

Be kind to yourself. Be kind to others. Have a great day.

Have a great week.

Bye.

The time is now 11.30 and your Eagle River Walmart is closed. Please make your final selections and bring them to the front of the store where our friendly cashiers will be more than happy to help check you out.

And as always, we thank you for shopping your Eagle River Walmart.

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The Shortlist is a podcast that explores all things AEC marketing. Hosted by Middle of Six Principal, Wendy Simmons, each episode features members of the MOS team, where we take a deep dive on a wide range of topics related to AEC marketing including: proposal development, strategy, team building, business development, branding, digital marketing, and more. You can listen to our full archive of episodes here.