More Usable Asset Change Tracking
Hey all,
We are leveraging Collibra for our corporate policy governance lifecycle, but I am struggling to find a solution for this one.
Historically, changes in policy were managed through change tracking in Word documents. Approvers would receive two copies of the policy to approve: a “clean” one, and one with all changes inline. However, we would like all activity to happen in Collibra.
Many of the users that are participating in the approval phase will be infrequent users of Collibra, and not especially technically savvy.
While the History of an asset does track its changes, it is rather unwieldy — that’s a kind word — when there are multiple changes in a larger body of text.
I am looking for possible solutions where I could generate and present a consolidated view of the changes to a policy asset to the reviewer.
I am considering the possibility having two versions of the asset, one with markups, and one without, that link to each other. But the question is: what could I use (probably from a workflow) to generate the markup given either
- the current policy asset , its activity history, and a date from which to compare, or
- a previously version of the policy asset against which to make the comparison with the current policy asset
Is there a way I could tap into the functionality that displays the textual markups in the History tab? Or something equivalent?
arthurburkhardt
·4 years ago · EditedAhahah, that’s fair.
Thinking about all that, it would be very good to have a “publishing” function, that would allow to see the state of an asset in different published versions, with a clear diff between one publication and the other.
Even better, would be the possibility to diff between any two published versions.
I guess it is possible to approximate this by editing the activity stream directly.
Tom Friesen
OP4 years ago · EditedHey Alvin, Arthur,
Thanks for chiming in.
I don’t think the SetActivityStreamListener would help all that much; I would really like to merge the multiple edits from an attribute field that the SME may have made, as opposed to having a dozen different versions that are identified in the history/activity stream.
I might just try a combination of these ideas, where I retain versions of the Policy against which I run a textual difference to effectively create a third version that shows edits. Though, as Arthur mentioned, this is getting toward the outback of workaround land; I may decide that it’s a little too clever before I get it done.
Thanks again,
Tom
alvinuseree
·4 years ago · EditedHi both!
Have you come across the snapshot manager workflow on the marketplace?
The workflow allows you to take a snapshot of a given asset and either restore or compare the current state of the Asset to said snapshot.
I used it with another client. Admittedly it wasn’t plug and play, a few changes were needed but it was a good workflow to have. We only used it to compare against historical snapshots.
Linked below - hope this helps!
Snapshot Manager - Collibra Marketplace
Workflow to create, compare, and restore snapshots of an asset.
arthurburkhardt
·4 years ago · EditedYes, fully agree with you there!
I’d add that the limitation of 100,000 characters per attribute (including html markup) makes Collibra unsuitable to be used as a documentation tool. We had examples of users hitting that limit because they pasted excel tables with simple formatting (cell color, etc.) resulting in MASSIVE html code.
Have you looked at the SetActivityStreamListener?
It allows to display a customized history of activities in a workflow task.
But if you’re looking to perform a diff yourself, then I don’t think it’ll help you.
There is a
com.collibra.dgc.core.util.text.DiffToolclass that would allow you to diff two attributes (an old version and a new version), but it’s part of the collibra internals, not really meant to be used by customers…I think this is going way too far into workaround land, and you probably had better link to a word document on sharepoint or some other document management system.