Document Vault
As an expert, you probably know of many, many resources that would be of use to your clients - things like e-books, audio clips, YouTube videos, Web sites and articles. Some of these are things you create yourself; others are things you find as part of your on-going research.
The Document Vault module gives you a way to organise these resources and make these available, publicly (to all site visitors) or privately (protected by a password).
How can you use a document vault?
Your document vault can be:
- A free public library of useful resources to all site visitors.
- A password-protected private library of resources for clients, members and audiences.
- An internal support library for staff, affiliates, licencees and contractors.
- Any combination of the above (You can selectively protect individual sections of the vault, or even individual documents).
Examples
We use this ourselves to give you access to a number of on-line tutorials about Internet marketing and leveraging expertise. Here's a sample of what's available:
Vanessa Hall of Entente uses her document vault as a public library of resources for site visitors:
Alicia Curtis uses a private document vault as part of her Student Success Support Web site:
What's in our system
- The software runs on our server ... so you can add it to any Web site, regardless of your Web server. In fact, even if your Web server doesn't allow CGI scripts, you can still use the software.
- Add an unlimited number of documents to the vault ... so you can create them for different groups and different topic areas.
- Add, delete and change documents at any time ... so you can make changes immediately and at no further cost.
- Organise the documents in a hierarchy ... so it's easy for users to find all documents on a particular topic.
- Selectively add passwords to particular sections or even individual documents ... so you can protect some documents while keeping others freely available.
- Daily and weekly backups ... so your document lists are kept safe.
How It Works
The Document Vault is a software package that allows you to link as many documents as you want into a single hierarchy.
Adding documents
The Document Vault is a directory of documents, not the documents themselves. To compare it with a library, it's the catalogue of books, not the books themselves. So the documents are stored elsewhere, and the Document Vault is a way of linking to them in an organised way.
Passwords
By default, anybody can browse the Document Vault, but they can't look at any of the documents unless they have a password. So you can show your Document Vault to prospects, to give them an idea of what's in it.
Alternatively, you can choose to make any document public, which means it's visible to everybody, even without a password.
You can assign different passwords to different sections of the vault, which
means you can decide who get access to which documents.
