Version History in ImageRight 4.0

When our company started out with ImageRight 3.5, adding annotations to documents was one of the big features that made the system easy to adopt. However, much like writing on a document with a pen, annotations couldn't be undone individually. One had to be very sure they were putting the proper annotation in the right place, because once it was committed to the page there was no turning back.

One of the improved features that came with ImageRight 4.0 is the addition of version history with documents. This feature allows people with the appropriate permissions to view the history of changes made to a page. While regular users can see the history of individual annotations by view the properties of each, the version history allows the quick review of each set of changes and a previous versions can be promoted to be the current version in the case of errors. This has allowed me to help some users "roll back" changes, which has saved them time and made people a little more comfortable with experimenting with different uses of annotations.

For .TIF images it shows the annotation history and for non-image files (like Word docs or spreadsheets) complete copies of the changed files are stored. This is an improvement over the 3.5 version where annotation history was maintained for the sake of being able to review who added what marks, but didn't allow for any type of administrative "undo" of annotation that were made in error.

When it comes to .TIF documents, it is possible to create a "new" version of a document without making a visible change. It's important to have an idea of the scenarios where these extra versions can be created in case you are tasked with doing some type of detective work regarding the history of a document.

Here are several examples of when a new version can be created without any visible annotations.

• Adding an annotation and then deleting the annotation prior to saving or moving off a page


• Clicking on a sticky note, without moving or modifying the content


• Deleting a sticky note


• Add a text box with no text and deleting it prior to saving or moving off a page

As people get more comfortable moving within ImageRight and using annotations, these actions will happen less and the true history of each document will remain pretty clean. The addition of this feature provides valuable details that are worth the hit in disk space taken to maintain the versions.