5 key components to an enterprise file sharing strategy
Sharing isn’t limited to certain people in your organization. At some time or another – really on a daily basis – we all have a need to share information, both internally with colleagues and externally with our outside stakeholders.
If your organization has yet to embrace an enterprise-grade file-sharing software product, you’re likely suffering from sharing sprawl. Perhaps that’s countless emails with large file attachments, unsecure physical USB drives, or employees using their own personal email addresses to sign up for public cloud-based file sharing tools that are out of your control.
By standardizing on an enterprise-class file sharing software product, you can eliminate sharing sprawl and enforce safe and secure file sharing. But what should you look for in an enterprise-level product?
Here are five key components:
1. Support for Identity Providers (IdP)
Instead of having to manually input all the user information, IT can simply leverage products like Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) or SAML to provide access to the entire organization. Finding a product with this capability allows it to be a quick deployment with simple user management over the long-term.
2. Visibility and activity trails
When staff use sharing tools that are outside of your control, you lose visibility into content escaping your organization’s secure walls. Finding a tool that completes your business content picture is crucial for truly secure content management across the organization.
The right sharing product will clearly keep activity trails for every share and every activity on every document to provide that visibility both for IT and for staff.
3. Content security
Not all content is equal, and certain sharing requires an extra layer of security, especially when files are leaving your four walls.
You need to be sure that your staff can set specific security options, like password protection, for each external link employees share. You also need to ensure content cannot be viewed longer than it should by setting expiration dates for each share.
4. Mobile experience and offline access
It’s a fact. Your workforce isn’t always going to be within your office walls. If your organization is anything like mine, you have employees who are working remotely, out in the field, without internet connectivity, on the go, from airport lounges to hotel rooms and everything in between.
Your file-sharing tool should support and adapt to these varied situations by providing an effective “anytime, anywhere” user experience. Whether that means providing mobile access and a dedicated mobile app or simply providing the capability for staff to sync items to their desktop and reference even while they are not connected.
5. Integration into overall content strategy
To truly work across the enterprise, these products need to compliment the systems you have already invested in, including any other internal content management systems. Where there is automation provided within these content management products, an interaction between those products and the file sharing tool allows you to extend your internal content strategy to include automatically sharing that content externally as processes require.
Keep these five key components in mind as you are looking for file sharing solutions to ensure you can invest in a single product to quiet the sharing chaos at your organization.
Looking for more information for best practices on enterprise-wide sharing strategies? Register for our next webinar to hear how Hyland has deployed ShareBase enterprise-wide directly from those administering the solution!
