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BriefcaseCloud

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Projects

The Projects screen organizes your projects into "tiles" that provide a heads-up display of what's happening in your briefcase. Each tile displays the current approval status, when the most recent activity occurred, which team members are assigned to the project, the project tags, and quick links to drill down into the project stream or files.

Different team members may see different projects within the Projects screen. Admins and Owners will be shown all projects within the briefcase while Basic Users will only see those projects that they are assigned to.

The Projects screen is sorted based on the view selected (last activity or alphabetical) and grouped based on the state of individual projects:

  • Pinned – displayed at the top of the Project screen, regardless of last activity.
  • Active – the standard state of a project, organized by last activity date or alphabetically.
  • Inactive – the project still exists, but is is not displayed as approved and not visibile to anyone that it may be shared with. Inactive projects are shown at the bottom of the Projects screen.

Click here for more information on project creation and management.

Team

The Team screen shows all the people who are members within your briefcase on BriefcaseCloud. You can grow your team by sending invitations from the Team screen to onboard new members.

Access Level

  • Basic Users are limited to seeing only projects they're assigned to and only seeing team members working on those projects. Simple.
  • Admins can view any project, see all team members, and invite new team members.
  • Owners have all the powers of Admins and have the additional ability to manage and remove Admins. Owner is a special access level that is only granted to the person that created the briefcase and this role cannot be assigned to other team members.

Billing Account

When you invite a new team member to join your briefcase you have a simple choice to make. Either the briefcase will pay for the seat or the team member will pay for their own seat. If you elect to have the briefcase pay, the new member will see no mention of cost during their onboarding.

Bulk Project Assignment

Briefcase Owners and Admins will see a link within each member's tile to quickly manage assignments to all the projects within the briefcase. Click here for more information on project assignments and roles.

Sharing

Sharing is a way to bring people that aren't members of your team into your workflow. You can share entire projects and/or specific files. Shared projects and files will automatically update as the content is changed by team members.

Shared To Me

This tab includes anything that has been shared from another briefcase directly to you. You can't make changes to this content because you're not a team member of the other briefcase, but you will see changes made by others.

Shared From Briefcase

This tab shows anything that has been sent outbound from a briefcase in which you're a team member and from projects you have privilege to see. Clicking the trash icon on any project or file here will destroy the share connection instantly. In cases where briefcase owners don't want to enable any sharing they can turn off outbound sharing completely on the briefcase update screen.

Notifications

Notifications let you know what other members of your team are doing inside the briefcase. Notifications come in three flavors:

  • The notification bell alerts you to anything that's happening briefcase-wide. The bell displays a count when you have unread notifications and hovering the bell will open a list of recent notifications. Notifications with blue dots are unread. Clicking on one of these will take you to the project or file or conversation that produced the notification and mark the notification as read. Colors are used to highlight notifications that may need your immediate response: blue for conversations, red for pings.
  • The main notification screen shows the same content as the notification bell but it includes all of your notifications rather than just your most recent. This screen includes buttons to quickly find your oldest unread notification or to mark all notifications as read.
  • The various notification bubbles throughout the project and project detail screens display a count of new activity related to a specific project or file. Hovering over the tile that's showing the notification bubble will clear these notifications.

Briefcases

Users within BriefcaseCloud may be members of multiple briefcases and the Briefcases screen is where you can manage these memberships. Each tile displays a briefcase that you're a member of and the particular privacy settings of that briefcase. Any user can create a new briefcase, and briefcase owners can use the Briefcases screen to edit their own briefcase's privacy settings.

File Previews

Turn file previews on or off in the Files tab of the project detail screen. This setting will override your team members' personal preferences and prevent any display or caching of preview data. If set to Off, Your team members will still be shown a default file avatar indicating the type of content but the actual preview will not be generated.

Off-Site Notifications:

Disabling off-site notifications will prevent notification emails from being sent to your team members, regardless of the member's personal preferences.

Out-Of-Briefcase Sharing

Turning off sharing empties the "Shared From Briefcase" tab in the Sharing screen, revokes any currently shared content, and disables the ability for your team to share new content. Turning sharing back on will not re-enable any previously shared content so be sure you want to completely break these connections before you disable sharing briefcase-wide.

Project Creation

Within the project creation and update screens, you can assign the team members that will be working on that specific project. A team member's project role is distinct from their briefcase-wide access level. A Basic User may be the lead within a project and an Admin may have a very limited project role. In this way, a project is its own ecosystem within the briefcase.

Project Roles

  • Follower - Simple role with limited visibility and interactivity within project. Cannot view the stack and will only see the active file in approved project. Cannot upload files or manipulate the project in any way. Can partake in discussion. Does not see the Action Tab.
  • Production - All of the abilities of a Reviewer, except no role in the voting process. Does not see the Action Tab.
  • Reviewer - All of the abilities of a Final Approver, except no ability to finalize the approval of a project. In addition, Reviewers are organized into a voting sequence to represent seniority, experience, or chain of command on a particular project.
  • Final Approver - A user with final voting power on a project. Has all project-related abilities.

Approval Prompt

Projects can either be voting-enabled or storage-only. Voting-enabled means that assigned team members will vet the files within the project and vote to approve or disapprove of the project. Storage-only projects do not require any voting because the files within will never reach an approved state. The possible approval prompts and their characteristics are:

  • Any - Voting is enabled. Any Reviewer's approval will prompt the Final Approver to review the project.
  • All - Voting is enabled. All Reviewers must vote in a predetermined sequence. The Final Approver will be notified to review the project only after every Reviewer has acted. Each vote action will create a notification for the rest of the team and queue the next Reviewer to act if needed.
  • None - Storage only project. No voting. No approved files. All assigned team members can view all files.

Project Detail

Projects are containers for ideas and debates, in the form of files and conversations. A project is organized into three main sections: Stream, Files, Action.

Stream

The stream is the communication hub of a project. It shows a simple summary of all conversation within the project and allows team members to quickly comment, reply, or jump to files that are being discussed. The stream also provides the Log tab - a running record of everything that's happened within a project since inception.

Ping

Sometimes you need eyes inside a project immediately. The Ping button enables you to grab your team members' attention, whether they are on-site or off, via system notifications. Comments and replies will trigger notifications based upon each user's preferences, but a ping will always get through.

Files

The file tab is organized into "tiles" that store not just the files themselves, but also the meta data - comments, versions, and tags - that are attached to the files.

Team members can upload new files to the project or create placeholder tiles that can be used to start an idea before there are actual files to place.

Each file tile puts the meta data front and center:

  • Comments - jump into the conversation that your team is having about this one file
  • Version Stack - allows quick access to the entire version history of this file, with the ability to restore a previous version
  • Tags - attach tags or modify the current tags on this file. To attach tags just begin typing and the system will suggest tags your briefcase is using elsewhere. If the tag hasn't been seen before just press enter to save it. Add as many tags as you would like, and click the "x" to remove a tag.
  • Ping - grab the attention of your team members directly to a file

Each file tile also has options available through the gear menu:

  • Edit - change the name, tags, or state (active, inactive, pinned).
  • Stack File - stack files to control versions and designate which is the active/approved/shared version.
  • Download File - force a download to your device.
  • Copy - make a replica of the file within this project.
  • Move - relocate a file to another project.
  • Share - share the file with a people outside of your briefcase.
  • Delete - move the file to the trash.

File States

When editing a file, you can choose between three states which will determine the file's position in the project and the visibility to other team members:

  • Pinned – displayed at the top of the Files tab, regardless of last activity.
  • Active – the standard state of a file, organized by last activity date or alphabetically.
  • Inactive – the file still exists, but it is not displayed as an approved file and not visibile to anyone that it may be shared with. Inactive files are shown at the bottom of the Files tab.

Outbound Notifications

Because there are often rapid changes inside a project, especially when it's first being setup, the project detail screen offers a button to temporarily turn off outbound notifications. The notifications will stay off until you leave the project and then return. This will help you make updates without triggering alerts of any kind.

Action

The Action tab allows voting team members to indicate that a project and it's contents have been vetted and approved. Approval is granted project-wide so all Active/Pinned files within an approved project are themselves approved. Inactive files are not considered approved, nor are inactive file versions within a particular file stack.

A project in any state of approval can be reset, forcing all voting team members to once again vet the project and either grant or deny approval.

See Project Creation for more information on voting.

Approval Expiration

Project approval can be set to automatically expire on a specified date/time. Team members will receive 24 hour and 6 hour notifications before official expiration takes place in order to adjust the expiration if needed. Once expired, a project returns to Pending Initital Approval.

Tags

The Tags screen allows you to manage project and file tags in bulk, by either:

  • Assigning/Unassigning a tag to/from multiple projects or files at once.
  • Combining tags by renaming one to match the other.
  • Cleaning up misspellings and capitalization.
  • Deleting tags.

Trash

The trash screen exists to help out in the case of accidental deletions. Versions, files, and projects that have been deleted will reside here until they're automatically shredded (permanently removed) after 30 days. Team members can restore this content prior to shredding or briefcase owners can shred content instantly if desired.

Note: restoring anything from the trash WILL NOT RESTORE ASSOCIATED TAGS, but it will restore all else (ie: files, stacks, comments).