Hi this is another tutorial about Weaver, and today we're going to talk about sharing documents. I'll cover how you upload documents are you link web pages and then how you can use both of those as attachments.
One reason that you'd want to attach a document to a workspace is that you want to share a set of documents with the other people in the group. Now imagine that you're trying to come to a decision about something, and you found that there's a set of documents that would help people understand the background of it. Maybe fill in some facts and details, maybe some stories that other people have had. The easiest way for you to get that out to the group probably is to compose an email message, drop those documents in and send it off.
That's going to be easy for you. It sends it to them, they open read them, whatever. There's a couple of reasons why you really shouldn't do that. The first is rather complicated but that is that if you have 10 documents and you send them to 10 people, Each of those 10 people have to receive those documents; they have to figure out what they want to do with them; maybe they just leave it in the email inbox. Then they have tons of documents in their email inbox. Maybe they've got a place where they keep the documents for your particular group. They have to find that space and save the document there or maybe they put it on their desktop or maybe they do a bunch of other things to them. The thing is that by sending an email with a bunch of documents in it you're putting some work some effort on those people.
When it comes time for the meeting they've got to remember where they put them. They need to find those documents and bring them back up if they want to review them before the meeting. So, what we want to do is try to avoid that.
There's a couple of other reasons which are also quite important. You're probably aware that emails are sent through the system in the clear, which means that every server along the way can read your attachments. Now I'm not suggesting that you should be paranoid and imagine that everybody is reading your email, probably not. But if the document you're sending is sensitive, you need to be aware of that and and think about that if you download from a workspace, it's going to be much safer.
Also there are type restrictions. Some people can and cannot receive certain types. So, if you take a bunch of documents and zip them up into a zip file and attach that, there's a lot of organizations that just strip zip files out. Also, email has a size limitation. If you send something that's up to a megabyte or a couple megabytes, usually you're pretty safe in sending that around. But if you need to send a large file, a large presentation or a video or something like that, it could be 20, 30, 50 megabytes. You're going to run into a limitation, and a lot of people aren't going to receive that.
The last one is the most important. We often forget thick groups. Chances are your group has a current set of members who are there now but it hasn't always been that way, I'm betting. And, it won't always be that way. There'll be different people that come; they'll be people that go. Now, if these documents are important for understanding the working of the group, if it's backup material or important reference material for what's being done, you want to make sure first of all that everybody in the group gets it, and when people join the group they will have access to it as well. So, by attaching it to the workspace you solve all of these problems. It's a much better way just to send and to share documents with the group, but let me show you how that works.
Okay, I've got here a sample workspace. It doesn't really matter what the workspace is but I'm going to pretend that I have a set of documents that I would like to share with all of the members of this workspace. If you go to the documents panel, you'll get a list of the documents that are currently attached to the workspace. When you put something into the workspace, it becomes accessible to all of the members of the workspace. Choose the options here and say a document. So, this brings up the add documents page, and you have a couple different ways that you can add them. Uploading files is what people usually do. That's the simplest way. So you have drop target area. You go to your file folder, you take your in this case a PDF file. You drop it there let me take another one and drop it there. And, so now I've got two boxes here for uploading. The reason it didn't automatically upload is because what you want to do is explain how this document relates to this group. This isn't a Lajoie la jolla. Agenda documents have a meaning on their own, but they often have a special meaning just for your group, and and the description here is a way to explain that. You click upload and it does it. Or, you don't have to include an extra description. you can just put it on there. So, now i've uploaded those two documents and of course if i click on the documents tab i'll see that they're there. No problem.
A second way is to link a URL and this is increasingly common. We find a lot of resources available on the web. In this case I've picked a YouTube video here. And we'll take all. What I did was I selected the URL up here and I did a copy ctrl C copy. And then when I say link URL, I'm going to paste the URL in here, and the system will try to come up with a good name, but in this case that's not a very good name. If it ended with a good name, it would have been a good name. But I'm using video. We can put some more description here like that so now we'll attach the web URL and by doing that it appears now in the list of documents. But of course, it has a little world icon here but otherwise it looks like another document.
There is another option and that is attach a Google Doc. Now in the attach a Google Doc place you have to sign in to Google Docs. Now I don't know if you saw that; it went by pretty quickly. I'm already logged into my Google account. So it went and check to see if I was logged in, and it logged me and instantly. What is going to do right now is it's going to access my Google Drive so these are files that are on my Google Drive. And then what I can do is pick one of these. For instance this, this, this JPEG here, and I just click the little link option out here again. It's pumping up a thing saying what does this mean uh here is a picture of the wreck or whatever it is. And you save it so that now becomes attached. Let me let me go back there and again. It's attached as a as a web URL like that, but it's a little bit nicer because I didn't have to grab the URL and place the URL in there by browsing through my Google Docs. I'm able to just grab a Google Doc and do that. So, we've attached these documents.
A second way is to link a URL and this is increasingly common. We find a lot of resources available on the web. In this case I've picked a YouTube video here. And we'll take all. What I did was I selected the URL up here and I did a copy ctrl C copy. And then when I say link URL, I'm going to paste the URL in here, and the system will try to come up with a good name, but in this case that's not a very good name. If it ended with a good name, it would have been a good name. But I'm using video. We can put some more description here like that so now we'll attach the web URL and by doing that it appears now in the list of documents. But of course, it has a little world icon here but otherwise it looks like another document.
How do you access them? Well anytime you click on a link you're going to get an access page like this. There's a couple things about this. You can make comments so people can can give you additional information before you download it, but you click download here. This is going to download it and it will download it in a secure fashion and only people who are members of the group will be able to access this. Plus anybody who joins the group later will be able to access it as well and that'll be a download of course. If I access one of the URLs for example the amusing visio if I click access the link in. Of course it takes me there a big surprise. That is, attaching documents to a workspace what you'll often find is that when you're in discussions you may want to attach documents to to the discussion and so the easiest way to do that is to make a comment. This is just a test topic. If I create a comment here, I can if I want I make some attachments. So when I click on the attachments button here, I'm seeing all the documents from the workspace. The more documents you add to the workspace the more you're going to have to pick from here. So, I could easily pick these documents and and click Save and those become attached to this comment. So, when I see the comment down here, I've got look at these. I've got the documents right there, and if I click on any one of these, I'm again I'm brought to this page where I can finally access it. While it makes sense to attach documents in one place and then use them in another comment, sometimes here in the middle of editing a comment. I remember that there's one more, and I go into the attachments dialog. You don't see that document here, so you go and grab. This might be helpful, and click upload, and it uploads it. You'll see it here, and it's also been put over here as well. And I click Save so now I've got four documents on there, and if I close this. I'll see that I have the four documents on there. So any place where you can pick a document for attachment you can also drag and drop it and upload it. Only the upload option is available.
If you want to do a link, you you have to go over to the document list and add the link that way. Or, if you want to, access Google Docs that way.
So that's it I've shown you how to share documents how to upload documents to the workspace how to link web pages to the workspace and then I've shown you how you can attach those to comments and to other objects within the Weaver system.
