The Tab Permissions view is available only to members of the Room Owner's team and teams where Manage Content permission has been activated. Tab permissions is where Administrators control the access and permission for invited teams.
Members with access to the Tab Permission feature will see the icon in the navigation panel.
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Preview
When creating a new deal room, the Room Owner is directed to the Team Management view. Here, the administrator can invite colleagues into the Room Owner's team to assist with the setup, and create external teams for the invited parties.
Permissions can only be set for published teams. (A team can be saved as draft but it will not appear in the Tab Permissions view.) Teams can remain empty and be renamed without affecting permission settings.
Click on the video below to watch a 2 minute preview.
Setting up a new deal room
The Create New Deal Room option is accessible via the Global Dashboard and visible only to System Administrators and Room Administrators of a client account.
The Add New Deal Room icon is located at the top-left hand corner of the Global Dashboard.
System Administrators - for guidance on how to add colleagues to the account and enable them to open deal rooms, see Managing your account, deal rooms & users on thedocyard
Step 1 - Create teams
Once a new deal room has been created, the room owner is automatically directed to the Team Management view.
Team Management is always accessible from the left-hand navigation panel.
If you know the external parties that will be participating in the deal, create a team against which their permissions will be set. It is possible to create a 'dummy' team and rename it later; the permissions will still apply.
For further guidance, see add new teams & members
Teams do not need to be populated for tab permissions to be set - best practice is to issue invitations after the workflow and permissions have been set, reviewed and approved.
At this stage of deal room setup, administrators only need to create the teams against which permissions will be applied.
Step 2 - Add tabs
Once the teams have been created, return to the Deal dashboard and start setting up the workflow.
The workflow is a collection of tab modules that deliver the functionality required by the deal's administrators to manage the transaction.
Click on the Add icon and select the tab type required.
A deal room workflow may include a combination of:
Checklists tabs - for task & project management
Document tabs - for file sharing & collaboration
Data Room tabs - as an integrated VDR module (with a Q&A tab).
For further guidance, see when to use a checklist, document or data room tab
Step 3 - Set tab permissions
Once teams and tabs have been created, select Tab Permissions from the left-hand navigation panel.
All the tabs will be visible across the top of the view, with the teams that have been published listed below.
Tailor each team's view of the deal room by setting tab permissions. By switching Deny to Allow, administrators will give a team access to a tab. Members invited into an external team that has been denied access will not see the tab in their workflow.
Tab permissions for the Checklist and Document tabs are set at tab level
Tab permissions for the data room tab include folder and file level
There are no permissions for a Q&A tab - once created, this tab is visible to all teams
Tabs can be saved in draft and permissions prepared before publishing. Creating a data room tab in draft allows the Room Owner's team to see the tab and contents, while ensuring that it is not visible to any external party. This is recommended practice when setting up a Stage 2 Data Room, where there are active participants in the deal room. For further information on publishing a tab from draft, see below in Publishing draft tabs & contents.
Step 4 - Send invitations
In order to join a secure deal room, your invited members must receive an invitation.
A member's registered email address is their User ID. This means that if an invited party registers a different email than the one the invitation has been sent to, they will not see the invitation and cannot join the deal room.
To issue invitations to join a deal room, return to the Team Management view, and click on the "Manage" button for each team.
Click on the Add icon to reveal the Add New Member window.
Complete the member's name and email address. Do not click the highlighted checkbox unless you want to send the invitation as soon as it is published.
By leaving the 'invite team members immediately' checkbox unchecked, a room administrator can populate the teams with invitations that are pending but not sent.
All pending invitations can then be sent at the same time by clicking on the three vertical dots at the top right-hand corner of the team's tile, and selecting "Invite Team'.
The first member invited to a team is an Administrator by default. The system requires that every team has at least one Administrator. A best practice suggestion is to have at least two Administrators for a team and that they are the members most likely to be actively engaged.
Administrators are able to move their own team members around between roles. They DO NOT have access to any other part of the deal room other than what their team has been allowed, or management permission activated.
For further guidance, see team management and understanding roles & permissions.
Once the invitations have been accepted and the invited parties join the deal room, what they can see and do in the secure deal room is controlled by the tab permissions that have been set.
Editing tab permissions in an active deal room
When adding a new team to an already active deal room, the process is exactly the same: create the team, set tab permissions, send invitations.
A team must be published in order for it to be visible in the Tab Permissions view.
Create a new team & set permissions
Once the new team has been created, go directly to the Tab Permissions view and the new team will be visible.
| Every tab is set to Deny until otherwise changed and saved by the deal room administrators. Once Tab permission is set to Allow, all folders default to Allow. The deal administrator can then set exceptions to exclude folders / files. |
| If tab permissions are not set before before issuing invitations, there's a possibility that a new member may join the deal room, only to find the workflow empty. |
Create a new tab & setting permissions
When creating a new tab for the workflow in an active deal room, the permissions options will appear before publication.
The administrator must be in the Dashboard view, where the Add Tab icon is visible.
Select the tab type and click Publish. The "Set Permission(s)" window will then appear. To set team access and permissions immediately, click "Yes".
It may be that the tab is required to be seen only by the Room Owner's team, in which case, click No and the default "Deny" settings will apply to all other teams.
Preparing multiple Data Room tabs - save as draft and set permissions
It is possible to create multiple data room tabs for staged deployment.
Where a deal room has active external members and a new data room tab is required, it is recommended that the tab be saved as draft. This allows the administrators to create the tab's folder structure and set team permissions before publishing.
In the deal dashboard, click the Add icon and select Data Room. Save as Draft.
All draft items are only visible to the team that created them - in this case, the only team to see the draft data room tab is the deal room owner's team.
Set up the data room tab's folder structure, upload files, and set tab permissions in exactly the same way as for the published tabs.
Tabs saved as draft are differentiated in the Tab Permissions view by colour.
Once the structure and permissions have been finalised, the tab can be published at any time and only those teams with permission to access the tab will be notified and see it appear in their workflow.
Publishing draft tabs & contents
When a tab is created in draft, by default, all folders and files that it contains will also be in draft.
It is necessary to publish 'top down' - tab first, then folders and then the files contained in those folders.
The Items to Publish workflow tool allows administrators to see and selectively publish all items currently in draft.
Select Items to Publish from the left-hand navigation panel:
All items currently in draft will be shown by type. The draft data room tab will be in the tab section. Click to open.
If more than one tab is in draft, make sure to select only the one that requires publication by using the checkbox and then clicking "Publish Selected Tabs" (the green tick), in Bulk Actions.
If you're sure, click OK to confirm.
Next, select the Folder View:
Select all folders, or deselect the checkboxes to exclude them from the bulk publish action.
Once selected, click "Publish Selected Folders":
Follow the same process for the files by clicking on the File tile.
Note: only those files that are included in the published folders can be included in a bulk publish action.
Team Notifications
Teams that have been given access to a tab are notified, and this action is recorded in their team's What's New and Audit Trail.
In the data room, when a file is uploaded to a folder that a team has permission to access, they are notified.
By default, when a new member registers - unless they change their profile settings - their email preferences are set to receive notifications as shown below.
Email preferences are under the control of the individual member and can be changed at any time by selecting My Profile from the user settings menu:
We hope that this introduction to advanced team permissions has been helpful. If you have any questions or would like further guidance, please do not hesitate to reach out to the Help Desk Team.
You can email us directly at: [email protected]