7 Best Practices for Document Sharing with Clients and Partners

In today’s business world, the wall between staff, contractors, partners, and clients is increasingly being blurred. Collaboration is now key, and the ability to share documents and workspaces, and work as a team on those documents is a must. Most organizations have a handle on managing their own internal document sharing and collaboration. What isn’t always well-defined is what special steps you should take to securely share documents with contractors, partners, and clients.

Collaborating Securely

So here are 7 Best Practices for secure document sharing and collaboration with folks outside your organization:

1. KISS – Keep it simple, stupid. No matter the collaboration platform you use and the policies you adopt, make sure you have ease of end-user adoption in mind – making users’ lives more complicated will only encourage avoidance.

2. Make It Compatible – Support the widest variety of file types. Otherwise, your users will opt for third-party solutions to bridge the gaps, putting your documents at risk.

3. Security First  – If security is a major concern, choose a self-hosted solution, so you control your documents throughout their lifecycle, at rest and in use.

4. UAM Is Key – Implement User Access Management (UAM) policies for documents shared outside your organization. The importance of this can’t be overstated: partners and clients have very different needs and present very different risks. 

   1. Define user privilege levels for externally shared documents

   2. Implement a minimum access policy (each user gets only the minimum level of access for their needs)

   3. Offer time-limited access (put expiry dates on external links to minimize risk over time)

5. Govern your data – Develop Data Governance policies to determine and manage document retention (what documents are kept for how long)

6. Trust but Verify – Carry out regular usage audits to ensure your policies are being applied correctly.

7. Explain It to Me Like I’m Five – Create simple, easy-to-consult explainer documents or videos to share with partners, collaborators, and clients to help them get oriented and stay on track in your system.