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Secure Document Collaboration Approaches
Widgets & RSS FeedsWhen we need to share documents with other people, our default approach is to open email, start a new message, attach the document and hit send. We expect that it will be received, and we wait to hear back. For many of the document sharing situations we are involved with, this approach is good enough. But there are other situations, however, when much greater security, access control, auditability, and reliability are required. In these situations, email for document sharing is absolutely the wrong answer.
Consider a scenario that plays out everyday in our law firms and corporate services departments. There is a need to share a collection of documents with other people that often involve highly commercially sensitive content. The documents might relate to a proposed merger or acquisition; or outline a proposal for a syndicated loan. Perhaps the documents contain the draft financial situation for the organization. In each of these cases, disclosure beyond the intended recipient list would be highly damaging. In days gone by, we would print off the documents, assemble all of the interested parties in a secured room, provide access to the document collection, and then ensure that no copies of the documents left the room. An approach like this incurs significant travel and disruption costs to all parties involved, as well as equates to longer time frames and higher stress.
Is there a better way, leveraging technology, to accomplish this? Yes. We can re-create much of the secured room approach with secured digital rooms for document collaboration. Organizations can build their own digital deal rooms, or quickly access a hosted solution from specialist service providers such as IntraLinks, Inc., Deal Interactive, Merrill Corporation, and Millnet, among others.
Hosted Solutions
Hosted solutions for secure document collaboration provide a central place to store documents, a way of managing who has access to the document collection, and tools for tracking specifically which people have seen which documents. With respect to this last point, secure document collaboration rooms need to provide fine-grained tracking on document access. For example: tracking whenever someone opens a document and the length of time that document is open for review. This allows the owner of the space to see who looked at what and for what duration of time, thus providing helpful insight into what actually was done and what was of interest. It is almost like being a fly on the wall in another person’s office.
The IntraLinks On-Demand Work-space service, for instance, provides a way for clients to share documents through a secure service. An IntraLinks project manager works with the client to set up the workspace. Once the interested parties have been invited into the room, the client is able to monitor down to the document level which documents have been reviewed. There are even tools to prevent people from printing, copying or forwarding items that they have accessed from the room. IntraLinks knows that the system and software are only one part of the overall equation, and so has stringent hiring processes in place to ensure that everyone involved at IntraLinks is certified as being clean and is subject to confidentiality agreements.
An alternative offering is Merrill DataSite from Merrill Corporation. Focusing on the same target market as IntraLinks, the DataSite services offer similar capabilities. Merrill is also quick to point out that it is the surrounding things that help to ensure a complete solution overall. Merrill boasts that all document scanning is done by the company itself, it hosts its own infrastructure, and is a “custodian” to the client’s documents.
One of the benefits of working with a hosted service is that none of the interested parties can be seen to have an upper hand in the transaction. The whole process of sharing is managed by an independent third-party. Thus, if there happens to be issues with accessing the system one day, the fault doesn’t lie with one of the parties involved in the deal. Similarly, because it is an independent third-party, every party in the transaction itself is treated the same; everyone knows that everyone else gets the same level of access irrespective of whom they are. If one of the parties both owns the infrastructure and is involved in the project, questions of preferential treatment can threaten the trust within the project.
None of these hosted solutions comes cheap, however. This definitely is not the realm of US$49 per month that standard hosted team collaboration solutions charge. This is the realm of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per room, given the security requirements on the one hand and the value of the deals and transactions being discussed on the other.
Build Your Own
Some organizations build secure collaboration solutions themselves, through the creation of a client extranet, using a tool like Microsoft SharePoint or SiteScape Virtual Deal Room from SiteScape (which was recently acquired by Novell, Inc.). For a large proportion of an organization’s secure document collaboration needs, they do not require the capabilities and high expense of a hosted solution. The need for fine-grained tracking is less and a level of trust builds over time in the reliability of the solution, when working with other firms on an ongoing basis. It is helpful if the organization taking this route is large enough to make secure document collaboration a standard part of its work, giving it leverage to encourage other firms to do business with them in this way. And for sticky problems, or where a client or someone demands the use of IntraLinks or a similar solution, they can easily embrace that and modify the pricing structure for the engagement accordingly.
Secured Room Approach
For organizations where secure document collaboration is a requirement on a daily basis, hosted services or homegrown re-creations of a secured room can make a big difference to the quality of work, as well as having peace of mind when sharing sensitive information. For the rest of us, we will continue to use email or perhaps Google Docs.
For Your Reference
Messaging News writer Michael Sampson helps organizations improve the capability of teams that can’t be together, to work together. He writes at michaelsampson.net
