Announcing: Document Viewers

The short version

You can now share a document's major versions with a group of "viewers" who get read-only access. This allows viewers to see your published content without exposing your draft versions or tasks. Viewers can then take advantage of Simul's advanced comparison features whilst preventing any duplicate versions occurring from sharing via email.

The longer version

Simul now has 3 security roles:

• navigate_next Owner: has full access + can add or remove users from other roles
• navigate_next Contributor: can create draft versions, tasks and publish versions
• navigate_next Viewer: has read-only access to the published versions

The introduction of viewers allows a document to be read by a user who should not have access to the draft versions.

This is superior to exporting the document and emailing it as the viewer can use Simul’s advanced document comparison features to see exactly what has changed since the last published version.

To share a document with a viewer, navigate to the members tab on your chosen document:

Select "Invite a new member":

Specify the user's email address and select the "Viewer" role:

The new user will see the document as a standard tile:

When the viewer navigates to the document, they will be taken to the major versions console and all draft versions and tasks wil be removed from view:

Make life easier for your recipients

This change is intended to make life easier for the consumers of your documents. They can easily see what's changed between major versions and determine how this impacts them.

As always, we would love to hear from you about making Simul the best version control system for Microsoft Word!