These new features are designed to facilitate communication and informal workflows around shared content, by providing a means of commenting within the Connect web interface. You can discuss Share assets, draw a Share participant's attention to a new document, ask them to review it, and receive their feedback.

The first thing your may notice is a new comment box when adding documents to a Share. This creates an initial comment against the new document, whether it's a PDF, an Office document or an image.

Once uploaded, you can press 'View Comments' in the Actions menu to show the most recent comments attached to this document.

If there are many, you can press 'Show more' to bring up the full list of comments associated with the document. From here you can see what Share participants are saying about a particular document. You can respond to a comment by pressing 'Reply', or post a new one by typing in the comment box and pressing 'Add Comment'. Some comments might attract lots of replies - in this case, the three most recent replies are displayed while the older ones are hidden. If you want to view older comments in a thread, press 'Show replies'.

What makes this really powerful is the ability to 'mention' participants and link to documents. Whenever you mention someone, they receive an email notification. There's also a new tray in your sidebar, which keeps count of new comments that mention you. You can click on 'Mentions' to view all the comments that you've been mentioned in. Mentioning is a great way to get someone's attention.

To mention a participant, either press the 'User' button in the comment field or type '@'. Then start typing their name or email address. You can also include links to documents in your comments by typing a '#', to open a picker. Alternatively, you can press the 'Link' button to the right of the comment field. Documents are automatically mentioned in the comment that is created when they are uploaded.

Once the comment has been created, the mention appears as a link with contact information for the participant. Clicking on a document link takes you to the document's location in the Share. The link also associates the comment with that document, in the same way as commenting on the document directly.

There is also a new button on the Share toolbar which takes you to the Share Conversation, a list of all the comments in a particular Share. The comments are arranged in threads and sorted as a timeline. This is a great place to see what's been happening inside a Share, or to post general comments.

You can combine these three new features - commenting, mentioning and linking - to create tasks on the fly, producing flexible and informal workflows between Share participants. When you upload a new document for approval, for example, you can supply a comment with it that mentions another participant, asking that they approve it. That participant will see the new mention in their tray, and follow the link in the comment to the new document. When they're ready to approve it, they can reply to your comment. As the creator of the thread, you'll get an email notification automatically when they reply. The workflow can continue as long as required - after the document's approved, you might ask another participant to publish it. These features are all about improving communication and efficiency in Objective Connect.

Commenting, Mentioning and Sharing Conversations will be included in our upcoming Premium Editions of Connect but are available for a limited time for you to preview.