Effective document review requires the ability to receive and manage feedback while keeping the document's essence intact. Zoho's document review features are designed with both authors and editors in mind. In addition to tracking changes and inserting comments, you can also lock sections of a document (so that no one else can edit it), filter comments and changes made by particular users, and @mention your colleagues to get feedback from specific people. At any point, as the document owner, you can use the Pause Collaboration feature to lock the document completely; then, when you're ready for the next round of feedback, you can resume collaboration.
Pause collaboration
You can temporarily pause collaboration on any document, which suspends the activity of other collaborators and the document remains locked until you turn it on again.
To pause collaboration on your document,
- Click the Review button at the top of your document to switch to Review mode.
- Turn off the Collaboration switch to off the collaboration period for the document. Now the active collaborators can only view the document and cannot make any changes. Turn on the switch, once you are ready to resume collaboration.

Mask content in collaboration
While collaborating on a document, you can choose to conceal a piece of content you think is too sensitive to be shared as such.
To mask a piece of content,
- Place the cursor where you want the sensitive data to be included.
- In the Tool Bar, under the Collaboration section, click on the fourth icon.
- A tiny text box with the mask icon will appear in the doc. Write/paste the content that is to be masked inside the text box.
- When you share the document, the masked portion alone will appear asterisked to the other collaborators.

Review the status of the collaborators in the document
Once you invite people to view, edit, or comment on your document they are added to the collaboration process. You can also view the status of each collaborator and see who has viewed, yet to view, or is active in the document.
You can check the status of your collaborators for the documents you own and have shared it with other users, or for documents which are shared with you with Read/Writer or Read/Comment access.
To see the status,
Click the drop-down arrow next to the Share button. You will see the collaborators list with the status.
If you are not the document owner, you will see a Shared with you button instead of Share.

When you're working on a group project, you have to keep track of the changes made and comments added to the content when you're away, right?
Writer notifies you of the changes made and comments inserted to the document via e-mail.
To enable this setting:
- Navigate to Review.

-
Click the

icon in the
collaboration ribbon.
-
You can now customize your e-mail notification settings from the pop-up menu.
- Select the first option to get e-mails for all changes made to the document.
- If you choose the second option, you can further prioritize to be notified of all or only new comments, or activities in which you have participated.
- You can also choose not to be notified of a specific document.
- Finally, you can make your setting default for all the documents as well.
- You'll get an email like the one shown below according to the selection you make in the settings.

Please note that if a comment is added when a collaborator is online, the collaborator won't receive e-mail notification.
Notify collaborators of the changes
If you want to get an immediate response from your collaborators to the changes you made, the "notify collaborators" option comes in handy. With just a short message, you can update single or multiple collaborators about the changes and avoid sending multiple emails.
To notify collaborators:
- Click the Review button to switch to Review mode in your document.
- Click the
icon under Collaboration. The Notify Collaborators window will be displayed.
- From the To drop-down list, select the category of collaborators to notify.
- Enter the subject and message for the collaborators and click Send.
