After SiftHub autofills your Primary Document with initial responses, teams need to review, refine, and validate the content before final submission. SiftHub's collaboration features transform this complex process into a streamlined workflow, enabling Delivery Managers to efficiently coordinate with team members through content requests and reviews.
Understanding Document Collaboration
The collaboration workflow is built around the Primary Document Outline, where each Section and Question moves through different stages - from 'First Draft' to 'Approved'. Team members can request content from subject matter experts, submit responses for review, change assignees, and track their assignments, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.
Different Statuses
When a Project is first created, all Sections and Questions start in "First Draft" status and are assigned to the Delivery Manager of the Project.
The content then progresses through the following statuses:
- First Draft: Initial state with autofilled content
- Content Requested: Assigned to a collaborator for input
- Content Updated: New content provided by collaborators
- Pending Review: Submitted for review
- Approved: Content finalized and ready for submission
Core Workflows
The core workflows that guide Questions/Sections through these different statuses are:
Content Request Workflow: Used when responses need input from subject matter experts, team members, non-collaborator platform users, or external guest contributors. This workflow moves content from "First Draft" through "Content Requested" and "Content Updated" statuses.
Review Workflow: Used when responses need validation from solution leaders or experts. This workflow handles the "Pending Review" stage and moves content to either "Approved" status or back to "First Draft" for revisions.
Comments: Independent of the assignment workflows, team members and guest users can add comments on any question or section at any time. Use comments to provide context, flag issues, discuss responses, or loop in colleagues via @mentions - without changing the status or reassigning the item.
Comments
Comments can be added to any question or section independently of the content request or review workflow. This is useful when you want to discuss a response, flag something for a colleague's attention, or provide context — without formally assigning or reassigning the item.
Adding a Comment
- Open the question or section details page
- Navigate to the Comments tab
- Type your comment. Use @name to mention collaborators or other platform users
- Rich text formatting is supported — bold, italic, underline, and links
- Click Save to post the comment
Editing and Deleting Comments
- You can edit or delete your own comments at any time using the edit and delete icons on the comment
@Mentions
- You can mention any collaborator or other platform user using @name
- Multiple people can be mentioned in a single comment
- When mentioned, a user:
- Sees the mention under the @mentions tab in My Tasks (Web App and Browser Extension)
- Receives an email notification with the comment and a link to the question/section
- Receives a Slack notification if the integration is enabled
- Non-collaborator platform users who are mentioned will only see the specific question/section they were tagged in — not the full project
- Guest users can also add comments on questions/sections assigned to them
History
Every question and section maintains a full activity log in the History tab of its details page. This gives you a complete, timestamped record of everything that has happened to that item throughout the project lifecycle.
History entries are generated automatically and include:
- SiftHub auto-detected this as a question — logged when the outline is first created
- SiftHub autofilled a response — logged when autofill populates an answer
- [User] submitted the response for [Reviewer]'s approval — logged when content is submitted for review, including any comment added at the time
- [User] updated the response — logged when an answer is edited, with a Compare changes button to view a side-by-side diff of what changed
- [User] approved the response — logged when the response is approved
Compare Changes
For Web App Projects, when a response is updated, a Compare changes button appears on that history entry. Click it to see a side-by-side view of the previous and updated response, making it easy to track what was changed and by whom.
History entries are read-only and cannot be edited or deleted.
Next Steps
- To learn how to request and manage content updates from team members, see Content Request Workflow.
- For information about submitting content for review and managing approvals, see Content Review Workflow.