Editors Can Now Better Collaborate With Smedian
If you run a small publication that you manage alone, this probably won’t be of much use to you. However, once your publication grows and you add more editors to help manage submissions, this new tool in the SMedian Chrome Extension (SMCE) might prove to be an asset to your team.
The Problem
When a new submission comes into your publication, all of your editors are alerted at the same time. If at least two of your editors are online at the same time and attempt to manage the submission, Medium’s editing system won’t respond well as it is not yet optimized for collaboration. With your editors working remotely from one another, they will not immediately know why they are facing trouble managing the submission. One might make a critical change to the content of the submission and, when the other makes another change, the first editor’s critical change could be lost when she is forced to reload the article.
If they are not forced to refresh, they will continue editing the same submission in parallel only to approach a possibly catastrophic loss of content when the system fails; changes you made may not be saved:
The Solution
The only worthwhile solution at the moment is to alert editors when another editor is already editing the article they are attempting to edit. That’s exactly what the SMCE does.
SMCE tracks activity in the editor and reports it to all users that have the ability to edit the article. It will let you know if another editor already opened the editor and if that was recent. It’ll let you know if another editor recently published the article. It’ll even let you know where the last editor left off in editing, and you can click on the record to scroll to that position in the article:
That’s it. I hope this helps your team better collaboratively manage submissions.
All that’s necessary to make this all work is to have your editors install the SMedian Chrome Extension. SMedian will take it from there.
