For work-in-progress management Cumulus provides user comments. From the Preview view or window, add comments, draw rectangles or polygons and communicate your ideas, approvals or anything else to other users. All comments are searchable, meaning you can find assets based on comments they contain. Plus, you have an archive of change requests stored right alongside the assets.

Cumulus provides several types of user comments: general comments to an asset, and comments that are related / linked to specific areas on the preview of an asset. For comments related to specific areas, three different tools – the rectangle tool, the polygon tool and the sticky note tool – allow to precisely place a respective mark wherever it is desired on a file’s preview. All comment text is displayed in a column to the right side of the preview. The comments column itself can be hidden.

Comments are displayed in chronological order (newest first).

A comment and the replies to it constitute a thread. If there is a new reply to an older comment, the whole thread is regarded as new and displayed on top of older threads.

To have the user comment feature available for assets, the catalog which manages them requires the record field User Comment Thread (and the fields contained in that table field) to store the comment information. If the User Comment Thread field is not yet included in your catalog, you must add it from the catalog template Fields for user commenting). For a description on how to add fields to a catalog, see “Adding Fields” .

To use the user comment feature, a user requires the appropriate permissions for the User Comment Thread field. (For more information, see “Subtable Permissions” .)