How To Protect Company Documents from Wrongful Guest Access – dox2U

Overview 

• Guest access is inviting external users to work with your team
• Invitation into your online repository isn’t necessary 
• Transparency is the key to effective guest collaboration 
• Intellectual property theft can wreak havoc on company operations
• dox2U’s guest access safeguards include IP tracking, Audit Log, and more
• dox2U lets you choose when, how, and who views your documents
• Legacy DMS platforms may not offer latest access management tools 

In today’s digital economy where all business operations run online, the need for secure guest access management has never been more paramount. Whether it’s customer data or company documents like legal paperwork, hiring policies, contracts, etc., sensitive company information in the wrong hands can wreak havoc in unimaginable ways.

Security provisions for paper documents in online workspace require novel file management practices that may not get offered in legacy document management systems. The same holds true for guest access management where the business must ensure that the guest user who’s viewing company paperwork is unable to edit, share, screenshot, or download the documents. 

What is guest access management, why is it important to document access, and how can companies leverage dox2U’s DMS to protect company documents from information theft while working with guest users? Let’s take a look.

What is Guest Access?

Guest access is when you invite an external user to join your team—it gives access permission to an individual for a specific document rather than an online repository. Once a document owner has granted someone guest access, they can view, edit, share or download the file, depending on the guest access limitations set in place. Guest access is an important element of document management that requires an extensive governance plan – checklist that clarifies what liberties and limitations are to be applied on guest users.

Importance of Guest Access Management

In the present day economy, no company can thrive without collaborative engagement. It must work with other industry partners, consultants, and freelancers to not just save on infrastructure costs, but also to leverage the global talent pool. Especially with the emergence of remote workforce, companies need a centralized document access environment to manage employee access to document repositories.

Guest Access Management allows a company to work together with partner players, without giving them unchecked access to company information. So while they are invited to join groups and teams or get access to certain documents and folders, the document ownership lies with the parent company. However, in the absence of proper checks and balances, external guests get unbridled document access. 

Some of the major challenges in creating a secure guest access environment include:
 

• Legacy software with dated restrictions limits in document access for guest users 
• Absence of guest access management tools and provisions for monitoring guest user activity 
• Lack of employee awareness around document access management
• Lack of information on intellectual property theft and preventive measures

All in all, companies that rely on legacy document management systems have very limited utilities at hand to monitor and control guest user activity on company documents.

How to Share Documents with Guests Responsibly?

What most people don’t understand about guest access management is that working with external guests doesn’t necessarily require an invitation into your online repository. Novel DMS platforms like dox2U let you collaborate with external guests without adding them to your workspace. 

Similarly, there are a variety of checks and balances you can leverage in dox2U’s guest access management that gives the document owner complete control of who, when, and how someone views the document information. Some of these safeguards include:

• Visual cues to indicate when a document has been shared externally with guests.
• Access rights for a pre-set duration for the guest, with auto-revocation of access.
• The option to revoke a guest’s access at will as per your convenience
• Restricting document handling capabilities for guests like the removal of downloading / printing options.
• Restricted document view for guests, maintaining the privacy of sensitive metadata information like tags, notes or document details.
• Sharing the document in a restricted mode prevents Guests from making any unauthorized and unwanted edits to the shared documented information.
• A detailed Audit Log that helps keep track of user activities performed on documents that you share with guests.
• IP Tracking for guests to provide complete information about where your document is being accessed from.

Transparency is another key aspect of guest access management that businesses should aspire for in their document management systems. A transparent guest access environment involves clear cut information on who’s the document owner, who’s sharing the document with whom, when and for what purpose. Furthermore, by employing visual cues and trackers aforementioned above, businesses are fully aware of how sensitive information is flowing within the workspace.

With dox2U, the external guest is notified of access rights in an email with a link to the document. The information includes:

• The name of the person who shared the document with them 
• The name of the Workspace from which the document was shared
• The duration for which the document is visible to the Guest i.e. the access duration.

Your guest cannot make any edits to the shared document and will also not be able to view the document details or the metadata tags/notes.

Other general safety measures to practice in guest access management include:

• Disable anonymous sharing and limit external sharing of sensitive data
• Track External User Activity
• Set an expiration date for your Guest’s access to your information
• Set link permissions for files and folders to ‘View’ if you worried about guest users modifying your organization’s content
• Add copyright information to your files

To sum up, guest access management isn’t just limited to partners outside the organization but also applies to company employees. Unless one has a strong governance plan in place which dictates what information is accessible to whom, it can be quite difficult to manage document access in the workplace. In addition, employees must be made aware of potential risks associated with IP theft. But for many all of this can be time consuming and expensive, as organizing awareness drives and allocating resources in document management requires investment. That’s why many leading companies across the globe switch to DMS solutions like dox2U which offers a variety of modalities in guest access management such as visual cues, pre-set duration, restricted document view, audit log, IP tracking and more.