Your Smart Digital Workplace

The Free and Standard Annotate.com plans (collectively referred to in this FAQ as the “Annotate Web Services”) are being retired.

If you are an Annotate.com Enterprise customer, this FAQ does not apply to you. The Enterprise agreement you have entered into with Annotate will continue in accordance with its terms.

Although they have a small following of enthusiastic users, the Annotate Web Services are no longer generating enough revenue to support the costs of maintaining them. As a business we have made the decision to retire the Annotate Web Services and focus our efforts and resources on other products within the Annotate group portfolio.

The Annotate Web Services will be retired with effect from 29 November 2023.

Between now and 29 November 2023: Your Annotate account remains active and you can continue to use the Annotate Web Services and access your Annotate workspace(s) as usual. All of the features and functionality within the Annotate Web Services that you have access to today will continue to be available.
30 November 2023: The Annotate Web Services will be fully retired. Your Annotate account will be closed and you will no longer be able to access the Annotate Web Services. All data and files stored in your Annotate account will be deleted within 3 months.

Free Plan: If you are on a Free Plan, you can continue to access your Annotate workspace at no charge.
Paid Plan: If you are on a Paid Plan, we will stop billing by 31 July 2023. Your access to the Annotate Web Services between 31 July and 29 November 2023 will not be charged, but you will remain on your plan and will not be able to increase the number of users you are allowed to invite. We are making the last months available at no cost to allow users time to prepare for the closure of the Annotate Web Services, for example downloading your documents and annotations that you wish to retain.

You can close and delete your Annotate account at any time. For detailed guidance on how to delete an annotate account, please refer to this guide. Once you have deleted your account you will no longer be able to access the Annotate Web Service. All data and files stored in your Annotate account will be deleted within 3 months of the date you close your account.

You can download copies of your documents and annotations in your Annotate workspace (including documents and annotations added by any users who you have invited to your workspace) at any time between now and 29 November 2023. Users that are invited to workspaces, as long as their accounts have not been deleted, will also be notified and their ability to download will depend on the role and permissions they have been assigned, which can be changed in the Admin page within the workspace.

For detailed information on how to obtain downloads of your documents and annotations, please refer to this guide. You will no longer have access to your Annotate workspace when the Annotate Web Services are retired on 30 November 2023 and will no longer be able to download your documents and annotations.

When the Annotate Web Services are retired on 30 November 2023, all documents, and annotations in your Annotate workspace (including documents and annotations added by any users who you have invited to your workspace) will be deleted within three months.

Unfortunately, we are unable to download your documents and annotations for you. We have made the download process simple so that users can quickly and easily perform the download themselves. A detailed guide to how to download your documents and annotations is available here.

If you do nothing between now and 29 November 2023, your Annotate account (whether you are on a Free Plan or Paid Plan) will automatically be closed down on 30 November 2023. If you are on a Paid Plan you will continue to be billed until 30 October 2023. You will no longer have access to your Annotate account or workspace after 30 November 2023. Your documents and annotations in your workspace will be deleted within three (3) months of account closure. If you wish to retain copies of your documents and annotations, please download these from your Annotate workspace well ahead of 29 November 2023.

Annotate’s Privacy Policy continues to apply. You can view this here.

You can email close@annotate.com.

Workspaces are areas where users can upload and handle documents. You can use workspaces to keep your projects or tasks separate e.g. you could have a workspace for documents related to a given client or project, and restrict access to the appropriate people.

Within the Workspace there are folders and documents. When creating a Workspace you have the option to use a template. Templates are predefined Workspaces with Folders, Documents, Groups and Users already populated for use. Templates are designed to save users time setting them up for tasks or projects that are similar of repetitive.

They will be asked to sign up and create a password before they can access your workspace, but they won't have any workspaces of their own. Like anyone else, they can create a free account if they want to start their own workspaces.

Sign up for an account; create a workspace for storing documents; upload a document; highlight text to add a comment; share your workspace with other people to let them add their feedback. The QuickStart section of the user guide should help you get started.

Annotate is targeted at annotating documents; you can also upload Office formats including MS Word (.docx, .doc), Powerpoint (.ppt, .pptx), text files and images (.jpg, .png, .tiff). These get converted to PDF on upload, and can then be annotated in the browser.

One of the frustrations of using PDFs on the web for example, is that you have to wait for the whole document to download before you can see anything. This is not the case with Annotate. When you want a particular page, we process it on the server and send just that page to the browser. Some of our clients routinely use PDFs that are hundreds of MB or 1000+ pages without problems.

Yes, to link an annotation on your document to a second document in your workspace, click the Link to button at the bottom-left of the Annotation Editor. This will open the Select a document dialog box, which allows you to browse your workspace for other documents.

You can also use the Link to… to create hyperlinks from documents to web pages, from the dialog box, instead of selecting a document from within your workspace, click on the Link to URL button. This will open a new dialog box in which you can enter the URL of the website that you wish to link to. Once you have entered the URL, click Apply. A hyperlink to the website will be created on your document.

Clicking on this hyperlink will open the webpage in a new tab.

Yes, we support unicode for both documents and annotations, so all languages should work fine. Occasionally there can be issues with uploading PDFs with some oriental character sets, contact us if you encounter problems with a specific document. If your documents are in MS Word format, it might be better to save as PDF then upload the pdf to Annotate to make sure the fonts are shown correctly.

No, with Annotate you can do everything within the web browser. It displays PDFs in high quality using HTML5, and lets you highlight text to annotate. No plugins need to be installed.

Not natively, but you can export them as PDF comments. PDF comments are stored in the document itself. In Annotate, we store them separately and filter them according to a user's privileges whenever they view a document. But you can export a document with the notes embedded as standard PDF comments. You can then add comments and replies independently (e.g. with Acrobat) and re-import them to Annotate.

The technology can do this - it scales to thousands of annotators on a single document. We've hosted textbooks and public consultations on public policy documents with thousands of annotators. Please get in touch and we can discuss options for large scale feedback; often the best is to set up a separate server running Annotate for your consultation using our Private Cloud service.

An administrator has access to all features and can create their own workspaces and add or remove users.

A user can add comments on documents in the workspace and reply to comments; if the administrator sets their role in the workspace to permit it, they can also upload new documents there. If you have your own Annotate account then the difference is essentially that users do not have access to the Admin tab.

As a viewer in Annotate you are able to view documents, see relevant notes and access chat. An administrator can create a custom table for roles and features.

All your documents and notes are stored in a workspace, and can only be accessed by people you invite. You can also set user roles, to grant some people view-only permission, and allow others to upload their documents to the workspace too. All documents and notes are served via HTTPS which ensures the data is encrypted over the internet. Regular off-site backups help keep your data safe. We can also arrange for a private server for your company, and behind-the-firewall installations for particularly sensitive documents.

A Group or sometimes referred to as an Access Control List(ACL), allows administrators to create groups of users within a workspace, to create private folders for sensitive documents - or simply to only make relevant users aware of certain folders. This can be set up from the "Groups" section of the Workspace Admin menu.

ACL folders have a lock symbol on them and you can easily discern which restrictions apply by right clicking on the folder to view access rights. To set up an ACL, choose "Folder Access" from the context menu of Folders at the workspace level.

It is important to note that ACLs are applied at the folder level, not at the document level - so when you move a document from a folder which has an ACL restriction on it to a new destination folder that does not, all users with access to that destination folder will be able to see the document.

Yes, we can arrange a dedicated installation of Annotate on a private server for your company, with custom branding and logos. For larger enterprise customers we can also install in-house on company servers, and help integrate with company systems using our API.

You can choose which of our data centers to use for your documents: USA, the UK, Singapore, Canada or Australia. When you first sign up, we pick the data center that is nearest your location for speed. You can change the default location for new workspaces on your settings page.

Back in 2005, the two founders were doing postdoctoral research in computational neuroscience, and were looking for ways to get structured access to experimental data. Almost everything is published as text, but there are far too many research papers for any individual to read. Rather than expecting scientists to change their behavior and create databases directly, they began investigating ways for authors to layer structured information on top of written text. After a number of iterations, this led to the first version of Annotate (Textensor). With the benefit of extensive feedback from users, the focus gradually shifted from complex structured annotations to collaborative discussion around the text, as seen in the present version of Annotate.

The ease of building up a structured index of notes across large numbers of documents reflects the software's origins in annotating scientific data and papers, and now finds applications in a wide range of areas where in-depth discussion on a collection of documents is needed - from lawyers discussing thousands of evidence documents related to a court case, to medical experts analyzing research papers and textbooks, to product marketing specialists and engineers checking technical details in marketing materials - as well as original target of students and researchers discussing papers.

Annotate was purchased in 2014 by Opus 2 International Ltd, they develop collaborative analysis software for use by litigation and legal professionals. Founded in 2008, the company has become well known for its best in class software and providing truly functional electronic hearing rooms as a service.

Visit - www.opus2.com

We have a product road map and release calendar, and aim to do a release each quarter. Each release will contain feature enhancements and fixes. Contact us for further information.

We have a number of Quick Reference Guides, Product Guides and Product Videos that can be found in the recourses page, these will take you from beginner to expert in no time at all, Annotate has been designed to be easy to use!

No, it only uses standard browser features. You don’t have to install anything else.

You can print the web page to a PDF file using your browser, and upload the PDF to Annotate. We plan to have a smoother solution in future.

Not yet, but if you'd like it in a particular language, please get in touch. It supports documents and annotations written in any language. We may be able to offer a free subscription in return for translations of the language files.

The basic document viewing functions work in iPad and Android, and there is Annotation support on iPad too. We are working on an improved annotation interface which should make it smoother to make notes with a tablet.

Yes, please do. If you use Moodle, then our Moodle plugin may be of interest. It synchronizes accounts and learning materials from Moodle into Annotate. We also have a Blackboard building block and an LTI endpoint for easy connection to many learning management systems including Canvas. If your requirements do not fit well within the current structure based on shared workspaces then we'd love to hear from you. Just let us know.

Yes, see the Annotate API Documentation. The API can be used to connect an external document management system to a dedicated installation of Annotate. It connects with a separate server running Annotate just for your or your company's use.

There are currently three packages of our online service, FREE which is limited to three users (one user can have admin rights) and a total of 30MB of storage, STANDARD subscription which is for a minimum of 3 users with storage of 1GB per user, the subscription can be billed annually (with a discount 12 months for the price of 10 months) or monthly. Please contact us for ENTERPRISE version pricing details.

The paid for subscription is more feature rich, you can compare the versions here - Upgrading, it includes telephone support for example.

You are only committed to a month if you pay monthly. If you have paid for an annual subscription your subscription runs to the end of the payment period. Once you cancel you will no longer have access to your documents.

Annotate FAQ.

Features

Departments

Industries

Resources

Contact us