Bookmarks: The New Annotations

Document review. The most common practice of any document-driven process or business. When a new contract, policy, correspondence or amendment enters an enterprise content management (ECM) system, someone has to review it to ensure accuracy, compliance and completeness. Historically, annotations were the best mechanism to call attention to specific areas of a document for additional processing.

Over time, document viewers changed, workflow systems improved, and ways of interacting with documents became more flexible. Annotation usage and methods remained the same however. Don’t get me wrong – annotations are useful. They point to, highlight and notate specific information in a document, but you have to know where to look for them.

 The Trouble with Annotations

For all the benefits annotations offered, there are some drawbacks.

The first is the core usability of them across different viewers. Annotations are typically displayed by the specific viewer being used, and normally in a read- or view-only mode. For example, if using a generic PDF viewer, you can create annotations on the PDF in read-only and read-write manner, but that is only for PDF. The annotations don’t transfer to Microsoft Word, TIFF or HTML pages. This method does not work well for an ECM or process-based solution that incorporates different mime types. The biggest determinant of annotations is the technical association to the viewing technology being used.

The second drawback is that many annotations only have meaning during the process. When the process is over their meaning is lost, but they still remain on the content. Remember, annotations are basically the digital version of sticky notes placed on paper. They were the stop gap from paper to digital.

The Annotation Replacement
Am I saying bookmarks are the new way to use annotations? Well, yes. This is a bold statement, so let me explain.

Bookmarks provide users with a quick link to key, business-specific information that is valuable to them.

With annotations, a typical process looked like this:

1. A person opened a letter and highlighted the type of document (e.g., change of address or new insurance claim) then passed it along to the next person.
2. Based on the type of document, the next person highlighted important information, placed sticky notes with instructions and passed it along.
3. Finally, someone acted on the instructions and performed the work.

With bookmarks, the process would look like this:

1. A document arrives and is scanned or added to the content management system which automatically identifies the document type.
2. The document is routed to the team responsible for the work, for example, address changes. 
3. An individual opens their work, sees the document (without annotations) and determines for themselves the before and after address by reading the document. 
4. They perform the address change, but maybe the document also references an additional action needed on the second page. At this point, the individual working creates a bookmark titled “Change of Beneficiary.” 
5. The creation of the bookmark triggers the document to be routed to that team.

So, what happened here, and why is this better?

• The identification of the document type is performed automatically.
• You can toss your sticky notes in the trash since there’s no need for them to provide direction on work. 
• The document itself is not modified so long-term retention and migration (technical debt) is not an issue.
• The work needing to be performed is stated and described in the business process solution.
• The bookmark identifies different parts of the document by business action. That distinction has meaning past the business process being executed. It is a change of address document that also has a change of beneficiary.

It’s important to note that bookmarks are not limited to PDFs. They use an external type of bookmark management that is associated with any MIME type.

 Another major benefit of bookmarks is that they can advance with technology. They are well-suited to take advantage of and implement AI technical, whereas annotations are little to none. Bookmarks can be auto-generated within a business process and designed to provide process-specific information. More advanced viewers also can highlight the content that the bookmark references.

To learn more about how bookmarks can help users make informed decisions based on hundreds or thousands of documents and images, download our Lightweight Viewer datasheet. [link to datasheet]