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Google’s Workspace (formerly G Suite) has more than 2 billion active users today.
Professionals across various industries rely on Google Workspace in general and Google Docs, in particular, to get their work done; and content development teams are no different.
Let’s start by understanding how Google Docs has cemented itself as a must-have tool for WordPress content development teams.
How Google Docs Suggestions Help WordPress Editorial Workflow
As a lot of teams have gone remote and/or hybrid, the biggest issue was collaboration. An issue that was solved by Google Docs.
WordPress content development teams widely use Google Docs all over the world due to the following three advantages.
1. Suggestion mode with tagging
While collaborating on content remotely, sharing feedback used to be the most challenging phase. Either it involved long and boring email chains or screen-sharing meetings which are time-consuming and tedious.
Google Docs with “Suggestion Mode” solved this problem. Now collaborators can share feedback on content directly with the concerned person by tagging them. This removes confusion and ambiguity.
2. Get feedback in one place
Another challenge that collaborators used to face while going through multiple review cycles is collating feedback. To access the previous reviews, they either had to see the document’s editing/version history, scroll through the email chains, or rely on other forms of documentation.
This increases the probability of repeated mistakes in the subsequent WordPress content review cycles.
Google Docs has simplified this by making the past feedback accessible to every collaborator through the “Comment” button at the top right corner.
3. Collaborative editing
As more and more content development teams are working from different locations, it is crucial to have a system in place that helps them work together. This involves contributing different sections of the same post, reviewing each other’s work, and editing drafts.
Google Docs has made collaborative editing seamless where multiple authors can work on one piece at the same time.
The aforementioned advantages of Google Docs make it a must-have tool for WordPress content development teams.
However, there are some undeniable disadvantages of using Google Docs for content collaboration.
Risks With Using Google Docs for WordPress Editorial Process
WordPress content development teams have grown larger in size and operation with inter-organizational content collaboration becoming more common.
Unfortunately, this brings up the following challenges.
1. Back and forth between Google Docs and WordPress Editor
Here is a kicker: Google Docs is not a blog editor. It is a collaborative content editing platform that is used to draft and edit blog posts.
Although that is a well-known fact, the challenges associated are not. Here are some issues faced by WordPress content development teams while drafting and editing blog posts on Google Docs:
- Last-minute editing: When the content is moved to WordPress Editor, the formatting of it breaks. This increases the work needed to be done by the editor.
- Collaborating on video content: Getting and giving feedback on videos is not possible on Google Docs.
- Reviewing dynamic content: CTA boxes, image carousels, embedded social media content, etc., cannot be reviewed in Google Docs.
When the above changes are integrated into the contents of the post, it often becomes something else. This can lead to disagreements between the content managers and the clients.
Thus begins the back and forth between Google Docs and WordPress editor.
2. Security risks of sharing private files with external parties
Sharing content through Google Docs has become so normalized that we rarely even think that we are sharing private files with members outside our organizations. The risk of mistakenly giving access to confidential content of the organization increases while sharing folders.
Apart from that, including more tools in the workflow that will be integrated with the Google Workspace, and giving permissions to external parties to add/invite more members increases the security risk.
With so many professionals collaborating, it can be hard to keep track of things. Doing so means using yet another tool or managing extra Google Sheets and dedicating extra time to keep it updated.
This puts WordPress content teams at crossroads. On the one hand, the advantages of using Google Docs are undeniable. On the other hand, it makes the process slower and more tedious while increasing security risks.
Fortunately, Multicollab, a WordPress collaborative plugin, comes to the rescue.
How Multicollab Enables Google Docs-Style Suggestion Mode in WordPress
Multicollab enables Google Docs-style suggestion mode which helps move your WordPress editorial workflow to the Gutenberg editor. Here are the features that make Multicollab, a must-have WordPress collaboration plugin.
1. Commenting, suggesting, and tagging in Gutenberg Editor
Multicollab enables editorial commenting for WordPress which reduces the dependency on third-party content collaboration applications such as Google Docs and Microsoft Word.
Now, collaborators can comment, suggest changes, and tag others for streamlined communication directly in the WordPress editor.
As the collaboration and editing take place directly in the blog editor, there will be no last-minute changes or back and forth of content between the editing app and WordPress Editor.
Furthermore, collaborators can add comments and suggest changes to dynamic content as well.
2. Access a document’s editing history in one place
Having the entire history of edits of a document in one place helps authors, managers, and stakeholders repeat mistakes. Multicollab collates all the comments in one place making it easily accessible and making the WordPress editorial workflow efficient.
The comments history is also accessible via the Multicollab dashboard.
The dashboard will also help WordPress content development teams track changes across review cycles.
3. Manage permissions with a click
While collaborating on content through third-party content editing applications, managing permissions is difficult because giving or removing access is done manually, which is time-consuming and tedious.
Also, as multiple collaboration apps are involved, one has to ensure that the permissions are updated there as well.
By using Multicollab, content team leaders can manage the permissions of groups of collaborators with the click of a button as a content piece moves through different phases in the WordPress content editorial process.
The three features of Multicollab described above remove the two roadblocks that content teams face while using Google Docs and improve the WordPress editorial workflow in the following ways:
- Reduces the back and forth of content from Google Docs to WordPress by enabling collaborative editing on WordPress.
- Lets the collaborators share feedback and improve dynamic content as the editorial process takes place on the WordPress Editor.
- Secures organization data by moving the WordPress editorial workflow to the Gutenberg editor.
Summing up
Google Docs helps WordPress content teams collaborate on content easily in one place. But, it poses two challenges: editing difficulties as it is not inherently a blog editor, and securing organizational data.
Multicollab, a WordPress collaboration plugin, solves the above two problems by enabling Google Docs-style editorial commenting for WordPress in Gutenberg Editor. On top of it, it makes the WordPress editorial workflow more efficient as reviewing dynamic content is also possible.
Get Multicollab today and enable Google Docs-style suggestion mode in WordPress.
