Under document collaboration, we mean the ability of several people to work with one text document. At the same time, it should be possible to track all changes made in the document and return to one of the previous versions. Check how the data room experience differs from the traditional document collaboration in the article below.
Traditional Document Collaboration and Its Replacement by Data Room
Organizations need to protect data, not just the perimeter, and all of this must go hand-in-hand with security measures, which include both protecting the data itself and protecting the users working with that data. In addition, organizations should securely store and manage all encryption keys, as well as manage user access and authentication.
Collaborative work on documents is very important for the effective operation of groups in an organization. Modern technologies offer a range of ways to collaborate on documents for a variety of tasks, whether it's co-authoring a spreadsheet or approving a business plan using a workflow. Knowing these methods allows you to choose the options that best suit your needs and increase your productivity. From now on, you no longer need to pass a document around and then resolve version conflicts, manually merge, reconcile changes, track user actions, and look for the most recent version.
Collaboration can be organized in different ways, but most often, it happens like this. Someone writes a document, then prints it out and gives it to another person. The second marker marks the text in red, yellow, or green, completes his comments, and returns drafts for revision. With the advent of the Internet, documents began to be printed less, but in general, the process remained the same. Modern tools for working with textual information provide significantly more opportunities, which will be discussed below.
Virtual Data Room as the Best Way for Document Collaboration
As a rule, almost all information that is created in a particular organization is stored in the form of computer files available on shared resources on the network, for example, on various file servers. The disadvantages of this method of storing data are that it is impossible to collaborate on documentation, there are no additional functions, and, in addition, such a principle has long been outdated in our society.
It is highly recommended to use the data room over the traditional document collaboration because of the next reasons:
- The data room is suitable for use as a development environment, storing large amounts of data that can be classified into categories. Among the disadvantages of storage, it is worth highlighting, perhaps, the high cost of integration and the complexity of maintenance, which requires a certain level of professional qualification.
- If you open a shared document in the desktop or mobile app working with the data room providers, you can work on it even when you're not online. Other authors won't see changes you make offline. When you connect to the Internet, you will be notified of any new edits, and your changes will be made available to others.
Comprehensive VDR protection in conjunction with document labeling may be relevant for regulated industries such as the financial sector, government organizations (more than 90% of government officials believe that accidental leaks pose serious risks), medical institutions that store and process confidential health data patients (at the beginning of 2022, information appeared about the leakage of 48 million records of those vaccinated against COVID-19).