Zavanta Reviews

Summary: Overall, this is a good software.
However, if the above-described issues were resolved, my team and I would be able to do much more work in the amount of time we're allotted.

Positive: This software allows for publishing of documents to end users while minimizing the risks of common issues in my enterprise. We shouldn't have to worry about end users accidentally altering the documents, or performing edits poorly, or messing up the formatting and sending it back to us to fix it later, or multiple versions of the same document diverging from each other.
It will mitigate a lot of issues we have seen.

Negative: When authoring a document, there are some areas where the functionality could use some improvement. There are many strange little bugs that add up to consuming enough of my time that I feel compelled to write this review in hopes that someone from Zavanta sees it, cares, and does something to improve the platform.

1. There is no clear means to paste text from, say, a Word document without carrying over formatting. So, if I want to keep everything in the default font I have in Zavanta, and I don't want to type everything from scratch, then I have to paste it in whatever format it is in the source document, and then re-dress the font and font size in Zavanta.

2. When I go to change font and font size in Zavanta, a bug frequently occurs: I select all the text in a text box, then I go up to the font dropdown box to change the font. When I click the font dropdown, it un-selects all the text I had selected for reformatting, so now any new font I select doesn't apply to any text. I typically have to attempt to select the text and then click the font dropdown anywhere from as few as 3 to as many as over 20 times before it randomly works properly. Rarely ever does it work in one try, if ever. Except a few lucky sessions where it worked every time. I have yet to see any rhyme or reason to this. I have tried it in Google Chrome and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

3. In cases where some important operating words are in bold or underlined for emphasis, and I need to change the font or font size, in addition to the problem above, Zavanta will only change the font for the characters from the beginning of the line of text to the point where the bolding or underlining state changes. I'll have to repeat the process of repeatedly highlighting the text that wasn't reformatted and chasing the font dropdown again for each state of bold or underline, etc. in the line of text.

4. The above combination of three issues have a bad synergy, and the overall effect of making simple tasks take much longer, and more frustrating than they should ever be.

5. Table formatting is problematic to the extent that my team has decided the best way to do tables, is to import an image of the table from MS Word. Any time a piece of information in the table needs to change, the table needs to be re-worked in MS Word, a new image made and imported into Zavanta.
The table feature in Zavanta does not seem to allow for more complex tables, where one row may have one column that serves as a heading for the next several rows, which may have three columns; followed by another row with one column that serves as a heading for the next set. (Here's where we run into problems) If the next set of rows needs four columns, we can't do this without throwing off the section with three columns above.

6. The process of importing an image into Zavanta has some issues. There is a feature to copy/paste an image from the clipboard, that I have never seen work. So when I need to import a table, the easiest way to do this that I know of would be to take a screen shot in a program like OneNote. Then copy/paste that image from OneNote into Zavanta. Well, I click the button to copy/paste from the clipboard, and it doesn't work at all in Internet Explorer, and in Chrome it tells me there isn't an image in the clipboard.
So then I open MS Paint, and I paste the image into Paint and save it to my desktop. Then I copy the file and go to paste it into Zavanta as an image, and it does the same thing.
However, I can drag and drop this file in, so it works this way. it just seems to require several unnecessary steps to get an image imported, which I wouldn't need to do anyways if the table editor in Zavanta were more functional.