Using the Portal with Google Docs

Many schools use Google Docs and enjoy the functionality and collaboration it brings to their team. When creating the Accreditation Portal, we tried to copy as many of those features as we could, while still keeping the process simple.

We encourage schools using the Portal for the first time to try collaborating on answers with their Team within the Portal, instead of Google Docs.

Features that the Portal has that are missing from Google Docs:

1. You can assign users to chapters and there is no limit to how many team members can have an account, or be assigned to any given chapter.
2. Users cannot write answers in sections to which they have not been assigned.
3. The Portal also has a commenting feature for collaborators to remark on each others' answers.
4. In the Portal, you can lock answers when they are complete, which makes people unable to continue to edit them after you have approved them.
5. The Portal has a progress page, so you can see at a glance the percentage of each chapter you have completed.

We strongly urge schools to use the Portal, as it was custom made for the CAIS accreditation process. Schools who instead use Google Docs to compile their Self-Study have to copy and paste hundreds of answers from one app to the other, and all their formatting is lost. It is a long and frustrating process so we recommend using the Portal instead.