Team collaboration is essential on most work types. Other than the structured data, tasks, documents and KPIs associated with a given matter in ShareDo, it also lets you configure a number of collaboration features. These include comments, wikis, and the ability to share with external applications.

Introductory video on managing work collaboratively

View the Platform Deep Dive - ShareDoShow playlist on YouTube.

Wikis

Using the ShareDo portal designer, you can add one or more wikis to a given work type or workbench portal.

Wikis provide a rich text collaboration environment that includes:

• Check-in / Checkout.
• Ability to audit changes and have those visualised through the chronology.

Comments

Comments provide an easy way to keep a running commentary for your matter or work item and a useful mechanism to communicate with different parties.

Comments include a number of rich features to enable this, including:

• Important comments can be pinned. 
  
• You can mention people or teams. 
   
  The mentioned user or team will then get the relevant notification either within the application or as an email, depending on their preferences. 
  

You can configure the comments widget for various scenarios, including the use by external parties such as Consumer. For example, you can configure the comments widget to only show comments that are authored by or mention the current user.

See Portal Designer: Configuring Comments‍ 

Virtual Data Rooms

ShareDo supports a number of different document-sharing patterns with external parties, including configurable document repositories or integration with tools such as iManage share. Virtual Data Rooms (VDRs) provide an additional mechanism that:

• Is secure by design - following the principle of least privilege.
• Allows end users to create unlimited VDR's with any case participants.
• Can be managed as a separate entity within the system or else can be integrated with existing matter or other work type portals.

Within the Work Type Modeller, there is a dedicated work type for Virtual Data Rooms and also some example smartplans for automatically provisioning these for different circumstances.

Like any other work item, you can configure Virtual Data Rooms in terms of data capture, phases and so on. Within our reference implementation, we have configured VDRs as follows:

• When a client case handler is added to a matter/case, a VDR is automatically provisioned with the correct permissions and parties.
• Within the case handler's persona view, the new VDR widget is configured to show rooms alongside your standard DMS repository.
• Case handlers can then drag and drop documents directly to the VDR.

From an external participant's perspective:

• They are notified when a new document is added to the VDR.
• Depending upon your configuration requirements, external parties can either access their VDRs as part of the overall case or matter, or via a dedicated portal.

NOTE: While we recommend the use of virtual data rooms for external document sharing, there are a number of other ways in which you can achieve this including:

• Enabling external access to a shared case document repository.
• Provisioning both internal and external document repositories – for example, it is possible for a case to have internal documents stored in iManage together with external documents stored in O365. Documents can then be moved between repositories, thereby maintaining a clear “wall”.

Sharing

For a given work type, you can now specify that it is available as a "Share target"; this applies to all ShareDo types, both the out-of-the-box ones and your own derived types.

Once share targets are configured, you will get a share action available within the document repository view when selecting a document.

While we have configured this within our demo environments as a UX enhancement, we see the primary use case for this being integration with external document-sharing systems.

A typical solution outline for achieving this is as follows:

1. Configure a custom "Share" work type as a specialism.
2. Configure this as a share action.
3. Configure a workflow to trigger upon submission of this “Share” work type and call the external systems API.

Doing it like this, the end user's experience of sharing a document externally is as simple as pressing "share" and "submit".