If you’ve worked in a business at scale you will likely know the pain of document version control. Not just that but the difficult pathway to publishing policies and procedures through approval pathways. For some businesses this inability in G Suite has been a roadblock to moving to G Suite. A trial in G Suite Beta is underway to address that for businesses.
The update gives a way of requesting, controlling and tracking approvals on new documents for distribution through your company. Users requesting approval on a document from their manager or colleague can request one or multiple people review and approve their document. This will automatically be approved through the system if all requested reviewers approve the document, if just one rejects it – the document goes back to the author for further work.
The workflow is very simple to request an approval:
- In Google Drive, right-click the file you want to get approved and select “Approvals” from the list of options.
- If you have the file open in preview mode, this option is also available in the actions listed in the three-dot drop-down menu.
To approve or reject a file:
If your approval is requested on a document, you’ll receive a notification email and can take action within Gmail:
- You can approve or reject the document in the preview pane, and add comments.
- From Drive, you can see a pending request for approval in the action items associated with a file, or by right-clicking and choosing “View approvals.”
It’s also worth noting from the Blog:
Once you send a file for review, the content of the file cannot be modified, including leaving and resolving comments within the document. Only comments regarding the approval itself can be added.
A clever way to prevent editing of the document after one approver has reviewed the document, but approval is still pending from others. Simply put, this function ensures that all reviewers are looking at and approve or reject the exact same document.
G Suite are making some very intelligent changes to the system to focus use on business at scale, not just small to medium businesses.
Do these changes attract you to bring your business over to G Suite?
