Introducing Vantage Reader

Happy New Year!

2018 is shaping up to be an exciting year of new features and updates for ManageBac. We’ve been listening closely to your feedback, and are pleased to announce that our first major release of the year will be Vantage Reader – a new and improved ManageBac annotation service.

When will Vantage Reader be available to use?

The first phase of Vantage Reader was released today!

For any schools that used our previous annotation service, Crocodoc, please rest easy – we have migrated all of your files (over 2.5 million in total! That’s a lot of quality writing) over to the Vantage Reader. More importantly, we have preserved and migrated over all your legacy annotations – unlike other learning management systems providers who have migrated documents as read-only, you will have the ability to edit legacy annotations on ManageBac.

Please note that during the final release stage, you will not be able to use either annotation service (Crocodoc or Vantage Reader). You will still be able to download student documents onto your own computers. We estimate this final process should take no longer than 1-2 hours.

How is Vantage Reader different from what we had before?

We took it upon ourselves to create an in-house solution after receiving notice that Crocodoc was shutting down (facing end of life in Jan 2018). This means that Vantage Reader will be fully maintained and controlled by us. What this means for you:

1. Increased stability: we will maintain Vantage Reader forever as long as ManageBac operates
2. Interface design consistent with the rest of ManageBac’s look & feel
3. Product Roadmap: we will be able to enhance critical features that had been ignored like PDF exports without annotations, which we previously could not impact.

Phase One will include:

• Comment threading for collaboration with multiple authors
• An annotation toolbar so you can add typed text, sticky notes, text boxes, select areas of text, draw directly on the page, highlight, strikeout, and add squiggly or straight underlines.

Phase Two of Vantage Reader is going to include three exciting new features that we know many schools have been asking for:

• The ability to export to PDF with or without annotations
• Audit log for tracking all changes and annotation history

Phase Two is scheduled to be released at the end of the month. In the meantime, Phase One of Vantage Reader supports .pdf, .doc, and .docx files. Other formats can still be uploaded to ManageBac, but will not be viewable by Vantage Reader.