I’ve come across a cool new application. The product is Hylighter, created by David Lebow, a most interesting person.
David created this product to manage comments provided by multiple reviewers when he was working documents that required input from literally hundreds of people. He found it impossible to manage the comments in a conventional manner and developed this product to allow him to review and capture the comments he received (necessity being the mother, etc.). David will tell you that the product allows for the capturing and capitalizing on the ‘collect knowledge of a group.”
For the purposes of the work we proposal professionals do, I think of this tool as “track changes on steroids” or a “revved up review tool”. Having played with this product a bit and used it for reviewing proposal documents, ’m extremely impressed by this product’s ability to simplify the review process.
We all know how much fun it can be to try to collect, read and then reconcile comments from multiple reviewers. Hylighter makes this much simpler, whether there are just a few reviewers involved or many.
The tool sends a reviewer an invite and directs them to the document which they are to open and read. The document has highlighted area (thus the name) indicating what is to be reviewed, areas previously commented on by others and other information. The reviewer then inputs his or her comments. These comments can be categorized, such a “typo”, “informational inaccuracy”, “non-compliant”, etc.
When the document is opened by the owner, he or she sees the comments in a categorized and prioritized table, making it extremely simple to understand the relationship between comments and to reconcile them.
I encourage you to check out this cool new product which is sure to change the way reviews are handled in the future and become a standard tool in the proposal process.