How to Review and Approve Documents Natively in a Salesforce App

Content marketing materials, product catalogs, or any digital content produced generally require a review and approval process to be compliant. Proofing these documents using alternative methods such as email can be challenging to manage and typically involves a lot of back-and-forth and increased security risks.

If you need to incorporate 100% Salesforce-native features to streamline your review and approval process⁠—then look no further, as we created this blog for you.

We unveil a scalable, secure, and efficient solution for all your digital content proofing needs in Salesforce – Apryse WebViewer. Our native content proofing solution for Salesforce comes with dynamic features built right in to allow a streamlined review and approval process without leaving Salesforce.

No connector services or other API call-outs are required; you retain complete control over your data, and your digital content proofing workflow stays in your Salesforce application.

Learn more about our extensive document functionality on our Salesforce page. Also, see links to get-started resources and documentation at the end of this post!

Apryse WebViewer is a Salesforce-native Lightning Web Component that is drag-and-droppable onto any page layout and plugs right into any Salesforce application. The LWC streamlines the review and approval process, so you can enjoy easy sign-offs, and let your users annotate or comment right in the document, helping to make feedback clearer.

This Lightning component uses native and secure Salesforce files, which means no more third-party drives and shared accounts. WebViewer supports all popular image and document formats natively, including PDF, PowerPoint, Word, and Excel. And with its developer-friendly UI, the solution is fully customizable to your workflow and thus is industry agnostic to any specific requirements.

We’re already seeing this flexible component deployed today in various use cases like big production houses with film posters and illustrations that need to be reviewed and approved without leaving Salesforce.

This LWC makes it easier than ever to manage all your content reviews in one location. With WebViewer, you’re able to keep track of crucial conversations, saving precious time by automating tasks like follow-ups on feedback or sharing content.

You’re also able to annotate and comment right in the document, eliminating the need for back-and-forth emails. All stakeholders have access to the document where they can manage revisions and make and review comments side by side. This removes any uncertainty and makes live collaboration flow better, unlike when feedback is dispersed across multiple tools.

You can use the LWC in your Salesforce workflows by integrating into WebViewer comments and mentions API and connecting them to Chatter API for an end-to-end view of the approval process while leveraging Salesforce’s notifications. The solution also allows you to hook into Apryse mentions API to add your Salesforce users in WebViewer and provides APIs that can be used to capture mentions in the notes panel. These mentions trigger an event that we can hook into to customize the notification and approval process using the Apex Messaging class for emails or other methods.

All conversation elements, such as mentions, comments or replies, are stored in the document in XFDF format. We can leverage a custom Salesforce object to store these XFDF strings and poll for them regularly to get live updates. An example of this flow is to initiate a SOQL query on an interval from WebViewer, which will regularly fetch new annotations related to the current document. These frequent updates allow users to create a live or ‘live’ collaboration experience on documents within Salesforce.

Next, to control conversations, WebViewer comes with several built-in collaboration functions. These enable professional reviews via granular user permissions, to control who can modify what annotations and when. It also includes customizable annotation states, such as Accepted, Rejected, Canceled, Completed, and None, to drive approvals forward. We can use permission sets with custom permissions to allow Salesforce admins to fine-tune which users can change annotation states and approve document changes.

Apryse LWC brings other out-of-the-box features like precise image commenting technology. All stakeholders involved can place comments and annotations directly on different types of images, including JPEG, PNG, and more advanced formats like DICOM and Illustrator, along with documents, to quickly gather feedback. Each piece of feedback then turns into a task for the file owner. Additionally, having a 360-degree view of the document helps uncover what has been approved and provides a view into every interaction and follow-up with notifications.

If you want to deploy a set of changes, you can use semantic text comparison and use the search bar to look for files you have access to. Once you’ve selected two files, click “Compare” and the files will load up side by side in WebViewer with the highlighted differences for users to verify at a glance.

Apryse WebViewer built right into Salesforce adds flexible capabilities for multiple users to review, approve, comment and collaborate on any document or video to create more streamlined workflows in any Salesforce application.

If you're looking to learn more about our digital content proofing Salesforce-native tool and how to get started, check out our Salesforce solution page or reach out to one of our product specialists.

Salesforce developers can get started today with WebViewer and Salesforce simply by cloning our sample LWC project. Once you’ve done that, just download WebViewer. And for further developer get-started steps and resources, visit our blog: How to View, Annotate, Edit, and Redact a Salesforce Record Attachment File.