Collaborating in Nebo still needs a lot of attention from our developers, but we’ll go through what we can do at the moment.
MyScript account
To collaborate in the app, you must create a MyScript account. For that, you can use your email or an already existing account (Google, Apple or Microsoft). Creating accounts to access the collaboration feature is such an inconvenience. However, we have seen this model with other note-taking apps (namely Notability and CollaNote). For Nebo though, it makes sense because the app is available on different operating systems.
Collaborating in Nebo
You can Publish your note to start sharing it with other people. Turning on Private access lets you Add people, allowing you to send emails (with a message) to specific people. When you Send, your colleagues receive an email with a link to a sign-in page.
This setup has both advantages and disadvantages. It is great that you can open the link in any web browser, on any device. However, if you’re a Nebo user, it would be better if the link redirected you to the app (especially if you’re signed in to your MyScript account). The logging-in step feels like extra work.
You can Share link to the public, with Private access turned off, for anyone to see your document. It is faster and more convenient to share a document this way. Anyone with your link can open and view it without signing in.
How others interact with your notes
Your collaborators can only view your shared document, they can’t interact with it in any way. That doesn’t make for a good collaboration feature. They only get the option to Copy link or Download. If you want some input from them, they must download the notes first, in a .docx, .pdf or .nebo format. After making some annotations, they have to Publish the notes the same way you did.
By the time you’re finished going back and forth, you might have twenty copies of the same document. For a digital workflow, this is a nightmare.
When signed in, your collaborators can view all the documents shared with them and all those they are sharing (and see if they are Private or Public). They can search for documents and sort them by Date, Name and Owner. They can also display them as thumbnails or lists.
Updating the notes
When you make changes to a document, you have to UPDATE it for everyone to see the changes you have made. Collaborating in Nebo is not in real-time and it is one-sided. These are both huge drawbacks to working on documents with others. Nebo is available on multiple operating systems, perhaps that makes real-time updates difficult. We hope our developers can fix that for us and we look forward to having more features in the app.
