By: Connie Anderson
Technical Writer

Laserfiche features two ways to protect your annotations: making them protected and making them private.  A protected annotation is an annotation that can only be modified by its creator or the document’s owner – other users can view the annotation (assuming they have the See Annotations right for the document the annotation is a part of), but they cannot make any changes to it.  A private annotation is an annotation that can only be viewed by the person who created it.  No other users will be able to see the annotation at all.

You can either set an annotation as protected or private on an annotation-by-annotation basis, or you can set a default style for annotations. To set this for an individual annotation, right-click the annotation and select Properties, then select the Metadata tab and choose a style. The settings will be applied to that annotation only.

To set a default annotation style, open the Options menu and choose View (in the Laserfiche Client) or open the Settings Menu and choose Document Viewer General (in Web Access).  In the Default Annotation Type option, and select the default style.  All new annotations that you create will default to whichever type you select, although you can also modify their settings individually.

For example, you might want to protect an annotation if you don’t want its data to be accidentally modified.  If you create a text box with a reference number, and you want to make sure that the reference number always remains on the image and isn’t deleted or accidentally changed, you could protect that annotation.  Then only you and the document’s owner would be able to modify it.  A private annotation, however, is most useful for content that is sensitive, or irrelevant to other users.  If you want to use sticky notes to make reference notes to yourself, but you don’t want to clutter up the page (or the annotation search results) for other users, you could set those annotations as private.  They would then only be displayed to you.