Lesson #3: Sharing Documents

One of the most frequent and important activities around documents is sharing. Whether you are inviting other people to contribute to or review a document, or delivering that document to a client, sharing is central to collaboration and document management.

The Web View pays special attention to the process of sharing. When speed is a priority, wizards help you share quickly with people inside or outside your organization. If precision is what you need, the Web View gives you exact control over who has access to content, and what they can do with it.

For this lesson, we will start with the quick method first and then go more slowly through the other options to explain how sharing works in Xythos on Demand.

 

Task #3a: Using the Sharing Wizard

The wizard takes you through the typical set of steps for sharing documents and folders with others: identify the person, assign permissions, and send them an e-mail. Now, instead of sending the document as an e-mail attachment, you can make an email link to the document.

  1. Right-click on a document in your home folder.

  2. From the right-click menu, select Share.
    This option takes you into the sharing wizard. The other, more precise sharing tools are also available from this menu, but we will look at them later.

  3. Click on Search for Users, enter Wilson and click Find.
    When searching for users, the text you enter applies to the user display name (in this case, Cindy Wilson), username (cwilson), and e-mail address (cwilson@xythos.com).

  4. Select Cindy Wilson and click OK.
    You have added a user who has an account on Xythos on Demand. However, there may be times when you need to share documents with someone who does not have a Xythos on Demand user account, such as clients, partners, friends or family members. Xythos on Demand provides an easy mechanism called Tickets to help with this type of sharing.

  5. In the Choose Users window, enter a comma after the entry for Cindy Wilson, and then enter a personal e-mail address.
    Because the system does not recognize this e-mail address, it will automatically create a ticket for this user.

  6. Click Next.
    You are now in the portion of the wizard where you assign permissions to each user.

  7. Give Cindy Wilson Full Access, and the other user (the one who will receive the Ticket) Viewer privileges (read-only).
    These roles are actually bundles of permissions that reflect how people commonly grant access to content. Later, we will see how you can fine-tune these permissions.

  8. Click Next.
    Once you have given someone access to a document, the next step is usually to tell that person about it. The e-mail form included here saves you the trouble of having to open your e-mail application, such as Microsoft Outlook, to send the link. However, under My Settings you may change the default e-mail engine to use an e-mail client which is on your desktop such as Microsoft Outlook, Entourage, Lotus Notes, and more.

  9. Edit the e-mail message.
    Be sure not to change or delete the portion of the message that reads [ File  Subscribe to and/or Bookmarks ]. Where that text appears, the system will automatically insert the link to the document in the e-mail message.

    Sending a link is always preferable to sending an attachment as you avoid e-mail system problems such as size limits on documents sent and restricted storage for e-mail messages.

    Just as important for you is that you manage the authoritative copy of the document, instead of trying to track down all the duplicates sent around the Internet. Also you can grant and revoke permissions and see when users have accessed the document.

  10. Click Finish.
    You have now successfully shared the document and sent a personalized email notification to the people with whom you shared it. Xythos has made a lot of assumptions behind the scenes to streamline this process. In the next lesson, we will look at these assumptions.

 

Task #3b: Sharing Inside Your Organization

When you share content with people inside the organization, you assign an access control list (ACL) to documents and folders, specifying the specific privileges for each user or group. You can also share with anyone logged into the system, or everyone in the world (public).

  1. Right-click on the document you just shared and select Manage - Permissions.
    This page summarizes the permissions assigned to users. This part of the page simplifies the choices to common roles such as Viewer and Contributor.

  2. Click the Advanced Permissions tab.
    You are now looking at the specific permissions assigned to each user. Read, Write, and Delete should be self-explanatory. The Administer privilege lets someone change the options on a document or folder, including the access other users have to it.

  3. Click Exit.
    If you want to share the link with any internal user, you can send them one of two kinds of links. The first is a long URL that shows the entire path through the folder structure to the document, which is identified by name. The other is a simpler, shorter URL.

  4. Right-click the document and select Manage - Summary.
    Along with other information, this page shows the longer Full URL and the shorter, Intellilink URL. Which one you choose is largely a question of preference.

  5. Click the Home link at the top left of the page.

 

Task #3c: Sharing Outside Your Organization

As you have seen, if you want to share with someone who does not have a Xythos account, you generate a Ticket. Like the Full and Intellilink URLs, a Ticket is a link to a document or folder. Unlike these other URLs, a Ticket has several special characteristics. Tickets may expire after a specific amount of time after which the link no longer provides access to the document or folder. Tickets can also be password-protected to add an extra level of security when sharing.

  1. Right-click the same document you have been using in the last couple of lessons.

  2. Select Manage - Tickets.
    This page shows all tickets assigned to this document as well as the options set for each one. We will make some minor changes to the Ticket in the next steps.

  3. Click the box next to the ticket you created and click Edit.

  4. Change Permissions to Contributor.

  5. Change the Lifetime to 6 months.

  6. Check the option for password-protecting the ticket.

  7. Enter a password, and then enter it again in the Confirm Password field.

  8. Click OK.
    Now that we have changed the ticket, you may want to re-send it.

  9. Select the ticket and click the Email toolbar button.
    The other way to send a link to someone is to click on the Email button below the ticket.

  10. Click Cancel to close the window, and click the Home link to return to the user home folder.

 

What's next

The more content you add, the more important it is to keep it organized so that you can find it later. In the next lesson, we will use a technique called tagging to add identifying information to documents so that it can be used as search criteria when searching for a document.