The advantage of common access is that each member of the team who has Document Manager, Brief Manager or Document Filer access rights (including the client, if given Document Manager or Document Filer rights) shares the workload of creating a common centralised Brief. As documents are created or received they can be uploaded, viewed and downloaded.
Members of the team progressively can add documents to the Brief and follow its progress. Another advantage is that the documents will be filed and stored with an organised structure.
A client, expert or other person may also be permitted to view certain documents. The Viewer, Client or Expert category of User can be used for this purpose.
In the Brief Manager task area (click the Brief Manager tab) your Briefs (if any) will be listed in the Briefs window to the left of the screen.
To display only one Brief on the screen select the name of the Brief and then click Hide Other Briefs. To return to a full display of your list of Briefs click Show All Briefs.
If you are a Brief manager there may be other Brief Managers created by an Administrator. You will not be able to see Briefs created by other Brief Managers unless you have been made a User in the other Brief Manager's Access Group.
To open a Brief first point your cursor to the name of the Brief in the Briefs window on the left of the screen and left click. The name of the Brief should then be highlighted. Information about the brief, Access Group, and Users will appear in the large window on the screen. The information is hyperlinked so that changes can be made.
Categories of documents will be found in folders and subfolders. You should explore these before uploading any documents. Each folder has a name.
The All Documents folder icon is coloured orange. It provides a list of every document in the Brief. Every other folder is coloured blue or white. A blue folder contains documents. A white folder does not contain any documents or only contains documents in one or more subfolders. The particular subfolder with documents has a blue folder icon.
Documents can be uploaded by a User with rights of a Brief Manager or Document Manager. A Viewer, Client or Expert cannot upload documents.
If there is a square with a plus (+) sign to the left of a folder name, the folder has subfolders. A number in a circle to the right of the folder name tells you the number of electronic documents in that folder or its subfolders.
A blue folder contains documents within itself.
Folders (and subfolders) that do not have documents within them display a white folder icon. However documents might be in a subfolder of the white folder. If there is a number in a circle to the right of the folder name there will be documents in a subfolder.
To open a folder that contains documents point the cursor to the folder name. If the documents are in the folder or a subfolder point the cursor to the square with a plus (+) sign to the left of the folder name and left click. This will open the folder or subfolder. Then left click on the folder or subfolder name.
The All Documents folder contains details of all documents that have been uploaded to the Brief. Every document will have been uploaded to a specific folder other than the All Documents folder. An uploaded document is also filed automatically in the All Documents folder.
The default list of documents displayed by All Documents is ordered by more recently uploaded documents first. Documents can be re-sorted by relevant field by left clicking on the name in the column heading (eg Name, Date, Type, Author, Recipient, Status, Document ID and so on).