Some things that would make shared folders even better

I am working with a team and we are just getting into working with shared folders. Some things that would make this (great) feature better include:

Showing recently added references
As it is, users don’t know when other users add a reference to a shared folder. It would be nice to have unread or something like that. Or some reference managers have a filter for ‘added in the last week’ and ‘added in the last day’

Sorting/ filtering by user who added
Maybe related to the above, it would be nice to see the references sorted/ filtered by who added them

Parent folders as sum of child folders
As it is, parent folders hold their own references. It would be nice to have a type of folder that was a sum of all its children.

Shared tags
I like using tags and folders together in my personal library, but tags are note shared in shared. I think this has been brought up before.

Shared comments
This one has also been raised before… this is an important part of collaboration and a key missing feature.

Shared markup in Meta PDF
This one get a bit confusing when two users have the same PDF in their personal library and mark up that version. I think marking up the shared version results in sharing the markup, but this will get lost once someone puts the reference into their own library, which they have to do in order to cite with it in Google Docs (I think). I am still bit confused about that one and we have not tested it extensively.

Notwithstanding, Paperpile is the easiest sharing I have experienced after using several reference managers… nice work!

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Thanks for this great list. I agree with pretty much all of the suggestions. We are actively thinking about shared labels as this comes up all the time. We will address shared comments and PDF markup after MetaPDF is integrated in Paperpile.

We actually have planned a systematic survey among customers who use shared folders on how we can improve this very popular feature. So any discussion here is more than welcome!

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Another workflow that we have been dealing with is alerting collaborators of a relevant article. Something that would make PaperPile excessively awesome for collaboration would be a “flag for” feature in which a user could alert collaborators of an article that is likely of interest to them.

The obvious work-around is to make a folder for each collaborator, but this requires an extra step when the collaborator has seen the reference, s/he must remove it from the shared folder else the folder will get clogged up. This would be helpful to address the issue that there is no way to see what new references have been added other than sorting by date added and manually looking down the list. We are sending e-mails to one another suggesting particular shared references, which is burdensome.

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Hi,

I was wondering if there was an update on this thread. I’m particulary keen to see if there’s a work around for shared tags and shared notes, this would be a key feature to help with collaboration.

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