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Document Owner = Team or Sharing with Teams


samwoo

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Hello,

It is now becoming harder and harder to manage the documentation we have in Hornbill with New Starters coming in.

Can I request either one of the these to be a feature in Hornbill

  1. A Team can be an owner of a document, so anyone in the Team can make changes where required. This would avoid the need to have to change an owner of a document when someone leaves... The option to have a single owner should still remain however for security purposes, but most of our documents are used by everyone in the team and are often updated.
  2. Sharing a document with a Team. This option would make it easier for everyone in a team to manage documents. Again the option to share with individuals should still remain for security purposes, but most of our documents are used by everyone in the team and are often updated.

Thanks,

Samuel

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Hi Samuel,

On the first point, we specifically designed document manager to "encourage" ownership and responsibility for documents to prevent the document rot that you typically see on a corporate network drive.  By ensuring that every document has an owner then you can ensure that there is someone responsible for the document, to review it, to ask questions about it etc...making it possible to assign ownership to a group would go against that design goal. 

On the second point, you can add a document to a library and that library can be shared with individuals or groups alike, I would suggest the best route forward would be to use libraries to logically group your documents, and then share the libraries with the users/groups you need to.  Does that work for you?

Gerry

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Hi Gerry,

I think we had a scenario where someone couldn't update a document despite having permission in the libraries, i think this is the reason why I was asked to raise this call. I will check back with the people who asked to find out more information (and to relay your response).

I think the other issue is when someone leaves... the owner probably wont have time to go through all the documents they uploaded to change it to another owner... at the moment I have changed the owners via SQL Direct but i dont really like to do this... updating tables via SQL is till a scary thing, even if you know what you are doing.

Thanks,

Samuel

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Hi Samuel,

Yes please find out more, I think if a document has been shared with you via a library with the edit permission it should work.  

In terms of document ownership and leavers, that is exactly right, the idea behind the design concept was to ensure that your leaver process should include the need for someone to go through the documents they are responsible for and either re-assign ownership or remove from the system before they leave - again designed to help you stop the burden of documents rotting.  This has come up before and not everyone likes the system to be so ridged but in truth its good for businesses as most are plagued with documents and other file content that no one is responsible for, its a massive hidden costs that most businesses don't even recognise as a problem, they just throw more disk space at it and let the IT guys worry about it.  

Gerry

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hi Both,

 

We've also noticed the same thing - permissions applied / shared at the Library level do not apply to the documents within.

Admittedly we have a pending update for Document Manager so are going to run this to see if it helps.

 

Also @Gerry, regarding your comment about transfer of documents as part of the leaver process. What would happen is a document owner did not have a leaver period? for example, if they were escorted out of the building for gross misconduct etc.

Similarly, when we moved over to Hornbill one person was given the task of uploading nearly 400 documents from our previous system. As such they're now the owner of each but are not necessarily the person who is responsible. 

how would we transfer documents in these situations?

 

Thanks,

Jamie

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Hi @Gerry,

 

Thanks for the reply.

We've run the latest update to Document manager and are still having the same issue - i.e. permissions applied / shared at the Library level do not apply to the documents within.

 

Regards,

Jamie

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hi @Gerry,

 

Thanks for the reply.

We've run the latest update to Document manager and are still having the same issue - i.e. permissions applied / shared at the Library level do not apply to the documents within.

 

Regards,

Jamie

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Jamie,

No the permissions of the document will never be changed, it does not work that way.  If you share the document with a Library, all people granted access to the Library get access to the document based on the permissions you shared the document to the library with. 

Gerry

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  • 4 weeks later...

Hi @samwoo @PSG ,
 I have some further news in relation to some of the functionality you requested. 

To summarise the initial post where Sam mentioned two possible enhancements, due to the design philosophy described by Gerry around document ownership, the possibility of making a Team the owner of a document will not be something that will be considered. While such an enhancement can be perceived to give you more flexibility, having such a feature could allow the adoption of working practices that may actually take away that sense of responsibility and accountability that an application is there to help you enforce.

However, in relation to the second point where you request the ability to share an individual document with a Team or role, this has now been accepted and we will certainly see this feature in Document Manager at some point in the future. This will now fall in line with the other development priorities so at this time I wouldn't be able to provide a specific time frame in which this will be delivered but keep your ear to the ground!

I hope this will prove to be a useful feature.
Dan

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  • 2 months later...
On 5/19/2017 at 2:45 PM, DanielRi said:

However, in relation to the second point where you request the ability to share an individual document with a Team or role, this has now been accepted and we will certainly see this feature in Document Manager at some point in the future. This will now fall in line with the other development priorities so at this time I wouldn't be able to provide a specific time frame in which this will be delivered but keep your ear to the ground!

Hi Daniel,

Just wondering if there was any update on this? We had someone who left who did not share most of their documents with anyone, this resulted in me having to set myself as the owner of their documents via the tables which I don't like to do :'(.

Another Request
Can I request for an ability to define a "default" role that will be applied to every single document, for ones that already exist and for new ones? For example a "Documentation Super User" role, which means if anyone has this role, they can go in and make amendments to documents by being able to do the following

  • Updating the meta - can be defined as a setting
  • Updating the documents - can be defined as a setting
  • Ability to share documents with other users - can be defined as a setting
  • Ability to share documents to libraries - can be defined as a setting
  • CAN NOT change the owner of the document - can NOT be defined as a setting

This will resolve most of the issues we are currently having where a lot of our documentation are not shared with anyone despite numerous attempts to get users to do this...

Many thanks,

Samuel

 

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Hi @samwoo

Thank you for posting your experience - that is EXACTLY why we created document manager in this way.  The owner of the document is a critical role for each document of value.  We are trying to help customers solve the problem of rotting or useless documents.  Every organization NEEDS a  good off-boarding process that places value on a departing co-worker to re-assign documents they own, or seek permission to discard the documents as required.  Most organisations are not that organised so end up in the predicament you found yourself in.  The fact is these documents, if they are worth keeping they have an intrinsic value to your business and should be treated that way.  Perhaps what would be better is an administrative function that allows you to re-assign all documents someone owns to someone else... the problem with that though is you miss the most important practice of all which is reviewing each document for relevance - its a large an heavy burden carrying a load of documentation that is no longer relevant, but thats what most organisations do, if thats acceptable then Document Manager is possibly a bit too structured for our customers and would be better to have a simple network file share instead. 

So the big question for me is - is it worth Hornbill trying to solve real business problems through functional behaviours and coming over as inflexible or should we just give up trying and let document manager become a free for all file sharing feature? in which case I would question the value of developing it any further, might as well just integrate with Sharepoint instead.

Interested in any thoughts anyone has on this?

Gerry

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Hi Sam,

 regarding  "the ability to share an individual document with a Team or role", I haven't had a recent visibility of that particular change so unfortunately can't update you on any time-frame.

However, I believe the underlying reason for your post today is not what this change will solve. The sharing of documents with a team or role is intended to ease the administrative burden of making individual documents available and editable to more users, rather than adding users one-by-one which is currently what we're limited to.

What you are seeking today is the ability to understand what documents a user currently owns, and the ability to re-assign these to a new owner in the absence of the original individual (e.g. he/she has left). 
We will soon see an interface in Hornbill Administration that will allow a Super User access to address the ownership of documents in relation to users that are no longer part of your organisation.

As Gerry indicates, when it comes to document ownership, the rigidness of Document Manager is there to try and instil better practices within an organisation.

I hope that helps,
Dan

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