How to simplify client communication and document sharing for your team

Your guide to organizing work in ONLYOFFICE DocSpace

About ONLYOFFICE DocSpace

ONLYOFFICE DocSpace is a web-based collaborative office that allows users to create, edit, and collaborate on documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and forms in real-time in customized team rooms. It provides a complete set of tools for working with documents, including document creation, editing, sharing, commenting, versioning, change tracking, and multi-level access.

DocSpace allows users to work with a wide range of file formats, including Microsoft Office documents, OpenDocument, PDFs, and more. It also provides advanced collaboration features, such as co-authoring, real-time chat, version history, and access rights management.

ONLYOFFICE DocSpace is a room-based environment, meaning that all documents are stored, shared, and edited inside rooms. With multiple available user roles, it is possible to fine-tune the access to secure the environment as a whole, as well as the files used by DocSpace teams and individual users.

Setting up DocSpace begins with the team. Let’s dive into creation of team hierarchy to understand how the user system works.

Setting up your team

You can invite users to your DocSpace via email or a link. External users can also be invited directly to a room to save your time.

There are following roles you can assign to new users:

Owner. This role is given to a user who creates a DocSpace by default. Owners have access to all settings and user management controls, and have some other owner privileges in DocSpace.

DocSpace admin. Grant this role to users whom you want to give access to managing DocSpace, rooms, and users together with the Owner. DocSpace admins can’t access some of the essential settings (such as DocSpace removal), and also can’t manage other DocSpace admins.

Room admin. Appoint a room admin to delegate admin work in certain rooms in your DocSpace. Room admins have access to room creation and rooms settings, and can invite users to their rooms.

Power user. It is important to understand the difference between power users and general users. Power users can create and edit documents, and have their own personal space for working with documents. All non-admin users can only access the rooms they are invited to.

User. General users can’t create or store their own documents, and only have access to the rooms they are invited to in order to collaborate on the existing documents. This level of access makes this role a safe way to work with external collaborators. General users can be invited to DocSpace in unlimited number and take different roles in rooms.

Editor. Users get full access to document editing in their rooms when you give them the Editor role. This way, you can invite unlimited number of guest users to collaborate with you without limitations in the files.

Viewer. This role can be assigned to any user in the room, providing them with access to viewing the documents.

Reviewer. With Reviewer role, your users work in Track Changes more to add texts and content in the documents in the form of suggestions. All changes will be tracked and highlighted with each user’s color and name.

Commenter. Sometimes you just need to get feedback or answer the questions of you collaborators. Commenter role is perfect for this task, as those will be able to communicate with comments while document content remains untouched.

Form filler. When you share ready forms, Form Fillers can fill them out to finalize the document. This is useful when you need to run a questionnaire, get an application submitted, get a structured brief from a client, or create a contract with client’s details.

Getting around DocSpace

The interface of ONLYOFFICE DocSpace is very straightforward and easy to navigate. Let’s see what sections you can access and what you can do with each of them.

• My documents section is available for privileged roles, such as admins and power users, who will represent your internal team. Here, they can create, edit, and manage their own documents to work on personal tasks or share these documents with others via rooms.
• Rooms section is a place where you can access all the rooms available to you, both the ones you create and the ones you are invited to. Consider it a central hub to access all current collaborative processes.
• Archive is where the unused rooms can be stored in order to keep DocSpace clean and yet retain all the data. You can restore archived rooms at any moment or delete them permanently. In archive, users can only view the rooms they had access to when those were active.
• Trash is a section is only available to privileged roles, and it is where all the deleted rooms go. Those can also be restored or permanently deleted.
• Accounts is a place where you can browse, search, and manage users, as well as create new ones and send invitations. Viewing and managing accounts is only available to the admins.
• Settings contain two separate menus, one for room manager settings where admins can change room-specific settings in DocSpace, and another for My documents section settings where you can adjust personal parameters for documents in the corresponding section.
• DocSpace settings are located in the menu in the bottom left corner, behind the thee-dot icon. We will discuss these settings later, in the separate chapter.

Creating rooms in DocSpace

Rooms in DocSpace pay a role of group spaces for quickly sharing the files between the team members, each of whom has a pre-set level of access, to avoid unnecessary repeated actions.

This model helps you create dedicated spaces for different tasks, such as sales team collaboration, client communication, reviewing and approving documents, or filling out contracts.

Two types of rooms are available in DocSpace at the moment: Collaboration room and Custom room. Here’s how they work.

Collaboration rooms

Collaboration rooms are the best fit for teamwork when you need participants to co-edit the documents and use all available collaboration tools. This doesn’t mean that documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in the room will be shared with full access to everybody: besides Room admin and Power user roles, you can also choose Editor, or Viewer.

If you need more precision in terms of access control, however, we recommend choosing the Custom room.

Custom rooms

Custom rooms allow you to apply various level of access to collaboration features, making this type the most universal. Here, you can also give users such roles as Reviewer, to only have access to reviewing features, Commenter, to use comments only, and Form filler, for filling our the forms.

You can use this type of room to fine-tune the collaboration space to specific needs, for example, for client communication and file sharing.

Setting up your client environment

First, prepare a space for collaboration with your counterparts by opening a dedicated room. To have more flexibility in access levels, we recommend using Custom room type for this purpose.

Next, invite your collaborators and give them appropriate level of access. For your team members, you can grant full editing access if you need everybody to contribute. And for the clients, depending on the roles, you can choose other permission levels.

For example, for someone who only needs to make suggestions in the texts, you can choose Reviewer role. To complete contracts and fill in the details, give a person a Form filler role. To help you understand certain topics and parts in the file, or to get and answer the questions, Commenter role will fit.

Once you create or drop a file in the room, each member will have level of access to this file according to their pre-defined role.

Customizing your DocSpace

You can customize your DocSpace to give it the look and feel that you desire. To access customization settings, click on the three dots next to your profile and go to DocSpace settings. Here, you will find General, Branding, and Appearance menus.

In General settings, you can set the language and the timezone, change the name of your DocSpace, give it a new URL, and a description that appears on the Welcome page for your users.

In branding section, you can choose logos that will appear throughout the DocSpace and change according to the interface theme activated by a user.

In Appearance settings, you can manually choose the colors of various separate interface elements to make your space matches your brand style.

Making sure your data is always secure

In ONLYOFFICE, we care about keeping your data safe. Besides permission levels that you can set for DocSpace users and inside rooms, there are other settings to help make your space safe and secure.

In Security settings, make sure you configure access to DocSpace with care. You can change the requirements for passwords, set IP restrictions, enable two-factor authentication, configure session lifetime, and more.

You and your admins can monitor the activity in DocSpace inside the Login History and Audit Trail tabs of the same settings.

Automatic and manual data backups will ensure you don’t lose any data should something happen to your infrastructure.

To learn more about making your DocSpace secure and configuring other settings, read the guides in the Help Center.

Ready to build your DocSpace?

ONLYOFFICE DocSpace is free of charge for small teams that don’t need big number of admins and power users. You can invite unlimited number of general users to collaborate with colleagues and external partners or clients.

If your team needs bigger scale, as well as full professional support package and more customization options, you can opt for a business solution.