I’m looking for an online document collaboration option that would allow some people to view and comment on the document but not edit it.
At my job we’ll be putting together a big document over the next year. Rather than using a shared drive or emailing around a bunch of copies it would be nice to have some sort of collaboration solution. People within the organization need to be able to edit the document, but there are also many external stakeholders who we’d like to view the document and offer comments on it. However, knowing some of the people we’ll be working with I think it would be more constructive if the external stakeholders could offer comments, but not make edits to the document directly.
My workplace has used Microsoft office for this in the past, but as far as I can tell in order to be able to comment on a Word document they have to have edit privileges. Google Docs is closer to what I want, but not exactly. It has a “comment but not edit” privilege level, but at this level people can “suggest” changes to the document (similar to Track Changes in Word). I’d prefer they be restricted solely to making comments alongside the document.
I realize this is a rather specific use case, but I was hoping there might be something out there that would do exactly what I’m looking for. Any suggestions?
