File history: best practice or workaround for multi-time-zone teams?
Working on our reports is a global team of people spread across many time zones.
This can create confusion / an extra burden when we need to communicate about historical versions of a file, since (per our tests) the timestamps displayed are in each user's time zone. A simple question like, "Can you check the changes so-and-so made at 7:14 p.m.?" requires some extra mental gymnastics and increases the risk of confusion or error. This is especially the case since changes made in one time zone may show up as having been made on a completely different day in another time zone, as well as the fact that not all global time zones are separated by whole hours. And, of course, the more numerous/frequent the changes to a document, and especially if you're hunting for a particular version and aren't sure which it is, the more complicated it gets—and all that is doubled if you're discussing blacklines.
Does anyone have any workarounds or better/best practices? The only two solutions I can think of are:
- Liberal use of milestones, which may help but also creates its own sort of clutter. Plus, this becomes a chore in itself (especially with a file with frequent changes).
- Everyone set their profile time zone to a common time zone (which, again, has some obvious drawbacks).
At minimum, it might be nice to have a time zone indicator on the historical versions' timestamps to remind everyone that the timestamps they're seeing are not necessarily what everyone else sees. Displaying multiple timestamps (for different time zones) might solve our problem, but that seems like too much complexity and clutter as well.
(Posting this under Documents, but obviously this applies to other file types with browsable history as well.)
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We make liberal use of milestones for personal tracking and internal milestones, i.e. pre-tax numbers have been updated, tax entries entered, tie out started, etc. We also use the starred functionality to mark "major milestones" like external drafts. You can filter for only starred milestones, so that way you can ignore the clutter of the numerous milestones. The only issue I've run into, is that if someone marked a milestone and I need the same draft to be a different milestone, then I usually have to make a minor edit (add a space, wait 15 seconds, delete the space) in order to force a milestone. It would be nice if Workiva could add the feature of forcing revisions/milestones for this purpose.
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