How Ideagen PleaseReview supports document reviews within Veeva Vault
Nicola Pearson 
Date published: Oct 07, 22
Ideagen PleaseReview has partnered with Veeva to offer customers the ability to collaborate on large documents with very high-volume teams—all from within Vault.
Introducing Veeva Vault + PleaseReview
Ideagen PleaseReview is a real-time document review, co-authoring and redaction software tailored to the specific needs of the Life Science industry. It’s proven to provide time savings of 65%, and cut review costs by 35%, with a comprehensive audit trail.
- Invite all your experts into the document at the same time.
- Built to handle heavy and complex workloads.
- Supports a wide selection of multiple file formats.
Don't just take our word for it. It's used by 85% of the top 25 global pharmaceutical companies, 4/5 top medical device companies and 4/5 top CROs.
In their FAQs concerning collaborative authoring in Vault, Veeva states that ‘PleaseReview [is recommended] for collaborating with large groups of reviewers and looking to maintain a very high level of control over the document and the review process.’
8 key reasons to use the Veeva Vault + PleaseReview integration
- High volume teams (~10 – 400+)
- Large and complex documents
- You work with PDFs as well as Word, Excel, PPT and other formats
- You need a detailed audit trail with full version history captured in a report
- You work with external collaborators who don’t have Veeva licences
- You need visibility to every edit made—with changes not lost or overwritten by other users
- You need redaction capabilities
- You want control over who can see what activity within the document review process at any given time
Ideagen PleaseReview is proud to be a silver-certified technology partner of Veeva Systems.
When to use Veeva Vault’s standard co-authoring feature instead?
‘Collaborative Authoring’ is a standard Vault Platform feature that integrates with Office 365 Business. It is available in any Vault application that includes document management. We recommend using Vault’s collaborative authoring when you have:
- Smaller teams. Microsoft indicates that co-authoring is designed to work for small teams of about 5-10 users.
- Smaller file types. According to Veeva’s FAQs, ‘co-authoring in Word performs better with smaller files (less than 100 pages)’. The technical limits of Word can be found at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/. Veeva advises that ‘[i]f you are authoring very large files, you should consider disabling the auto-save feature.’
- Work exclusively with MS Word, Excel and/or PowerPoint—not PDFs. Note that ‘Collaborative Authoring’ doesn’t currently support PDFs or other, non-Microsoft Office, formats.
- All your collaborators – internal and external – have Veeva licenses. To be able to use Collaborative Authoring with an external organization, i.e CRO, external users need to be registered in Azure AD as guests and have a Vault license.
- An organisation that has, or is prepared to purchase, Office 365 Business. Office 365 Business is the Business cloud product and offers subscription-based client applications, Exchange, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint and other services. Vault’s ‘Collaborative Authoring’ works with Office 365 Business and customers must have an Office 365 tenant with SharePoint. All end-users must also have Office 365.
How does the Veeva Vault + PleaseReview integration work?
As the PleaseReview software can be accessed seamlessly from within the Veeva Vault platform, there’s no need to go back and forth between different systems. The user feels that they are accessing and reviewing their documents directly through Veeva.
How it works:
- Navigate to a document within Veeva Vault.
- Go to Vault documents to set up a collaborative review. The Review Owner specifies the role and objectives of each review participant, their permissions and the deadline(s).
- Participants are invited. Review owner selects Vault users for document review. Participants are assigned a Vault task inviting them to the review. Non-Veeva users receive an email invitation instead.
- Review takes place. Once in the review, users can see other participants’ comments and proposed changes, and can add their own and/or reply to others’ edits. Documents remain in the controlled Veeva Vault repository while PleaseReview collaborative reviews are conducted.
- Document owner manages review within Veeva Vault. The Review Owner can reply, accept or reject comments and proposed changes in real-time. All accepted changes are automatically incorporated into the document.
- Final document automatically checked back into Vault. Once the document has been reviewed in PleaseReview, it is checked back into the Vault as a new version.
Is it difficult to invite non-Veeva users into the review process in PleaseReview? No!
You can easily invite non-Veeva Vault participants to securely take part in the same review—all you need is their email address to invite them.
Will my sensitive data and IP be safe if I invite collaborators into the review?
Absolutely. When you invite a collaborator (internal or external) to work on a document within PleaseReview, you can control what they have access to—even down to specific paragraphs of text. When they are invited into the review workspace, they do not automatically have access to all your other document reviews. So, you can rest assured that your sensitive data is secure.
Simple compliance with EMA Policy 70.
The redaction capabilities within PleaseReview make complying with EMA Policy 70 requirements far easier.
Key benefits of PleaseReview
Conclusion
As we have seen, both ‘Collaborative Authoring’ and ‘Veeva Vault + PleaseReview’ have complementary features and benefits. When choosing between them, it’s important to consider each one carefully to decide which solution is better suited to your organisation’s needs and projected growth.
If you are currently using Vault’s ‘Collaborative Authoring’ feature, but you want a review environment to work on larger documents with bigger teams, you may find that the Veeva Vault + PleaseReview integration is a more scalable solution that will support your expansion.
Veeva Vault users can leverage the power of PleaseReview to streamline and simplify every aspect of the complex document review process. The integration is game-changing for medical writers, clinical professionals, researchers, quality specialists, and others in the Life Science sector who work collaboratively on large documents with large teams.
