e-skills UK Guide

Online sharing of documents

Sharing documents with others online

This Guide is designed to assist you understand the benefits of sharing and collaborating on office documents in your business and take the steps to implement a solution.

Document sharing is one of the key aspects of collaborative working. Much of the work we do on computers is by ourselves but there are many times when getting the structured input of other people will enable us to create a better document, spreadsheet or maybe a sales presentation.

The technology in support of document sharing really took off with the advent of email messaging, and the sending of documents as attachments. The problem with this approach is that you essentially send a copy of the document to the recipient – the original document still sits on your computer.

Any changes a recipient makes to this copy of the document will not be reflected in the original document, resulting in a lot of confusion and frustration when you try and update the master version.

Multiply this problem by the number of people you send the document to and it becomes very difficult to aggregate everyone’s input in a sensible way. In the past the only solution was to get the copies back and then cut and past changes into the original – very time consuming.

With document sharing systems you can now put in place an infrastructure that supports a master document that can be shared, viewed and edited by any number of people, all of whom can, if appropriate, make changes to the same document in a controlled way.

The key to this sharing is for the system to track the changes as they are being made, so an alteration is automatically detected and attributed to the editing person.

With the use of coloured displays it is possible to see who has made what changes. The documents original author can then adopt or reject the various amendments or comments as they see fit.

The benefits of document sharing and collaboration

In a small business a lot of knowledge and expertise is held in the heads of key employees, and in today’s world these people may be spread across the country. As home working becomes ever popular the chances are that you do not have an office to work from rather you and your colleagues work from home and meet up every couple of weeks or so.

This can present a challenge when a number of you need to work on a document in a coordinated way. Simply emailing documents from person to person is very much a one way process and does not support effective collaborative working.

By working together on appropriate documents the end result will be the total of everyone’s input and hopefully the better for it.

A good example could be a sales proposal. Once you have visited the client you need to create a document with input from the commercial person, sales person and technical person, each of whom have a specific input to make. Often the sales person will coordinate this effort and by using IT tools to support document sharing and collaboration you can ensure that the various user’s input is intelligently incorporated into the document.

Choosing the right document sharing and collaboration solution

At the simplest level products such as Microsoft Word come with a facility called Track Changes. This enables you to email a document to other people and for them to add comments or changes to the document. When the document is returned to you these changes and comments are highlighted in various colours enabling you to accept or reject them. For many small businesses this solution is ideal.

If you are working on other types of documents and have a need to share documents on a regular basis then there are some more products available such as Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server. This provides an advanced way of sharing all types of team based data.

Another advanced sharing and collaboration solution is called Groove. This has some features tailored for the small business wanting to support collaborative working.

Implementing document sharing and collaboration solutions

Implementing a collaboration solution that uses document change tracking is very easy – you simply need to be running a suitable word processor such as Microsoft Word and have an email system that enables you to distribute documents as attachments, which all can do. The cost of this type of solution is minimal as the software is already enabled with collaborative features “out of the box”. Setup time is minutes.

The more advanced products such as Groove and Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server require a reasonable amount of setup and customisation. It may be necessary to invest in a specific hardware server to run the system if you are going to be sharing and swapping large amounts of data (i.e. using the system on a daily basis) In addition if your business relies on this type of application you will need to ensure the hardware and software is safe and secure, with appropriate backups in place in case of system failure. This will add to the cost of setup and ongoing support. If you are not a technical person it may be an idea to bring in the services of an outside IT consultant to help you setup and configure the solution. Setup may take 5 – 10 days.

Security concerns and document sharing and collaboration

As you will be sending documents to other users, including those working from home, you will need to consider the security aspects of your system. For the vast majority of businesses the types of documents being sent are easily secured using the standard security tools available in the software you implement. If you are dealing with more sensitive documents then you may need to consider a more advanced way of protecting your data as it is being sent and stored on different systems. As you will be receiving documents from other colleagues it is important that they have up to date virus scanning tools implemented on their computers to protect the business from malware. For more details take a look at the Computer Viruses and Malware Guide.