Document Management
The purpose of Document Management is to make it easy to securely share files with other team members. The files can be in any format such as Word documents, Excel spreadsheets or AutoCAD drawings.
There are a few ways to manage file sharing through local area networks, or FTP websites, but they are not always safe or user friendly.
TeemWork's Document Management is an easy to use interface to manage your team's documents. Document Management is very similar in usage to Contacts, for both team members and Administrators.
If you are an Administrator who wants to setup Document Management for your team, read
The following sections explain how team members can use Document Management. If you are not familiar with Contacts, you should get acquainted with them before proceeding, as they are a very important feature of TeemWork, and using Document Management is very similar to using Contacts.
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To view a document list, first, open up the Contact List by clicking on the 'Contacts' menu. Then, click on the 'Contact Type' drop-down menu, in the upper-left corner, and select the Document List that you want:
As you can see, "real" Contact lists are displayed in the drop-down menu, such as 'Client' and 'Supplier, but there are also document lists, such as 'Doc_Sales' and 'Doc_Project'. It is customary to prefix a Document list's name with 'Doc', to distinguish it from normal Contact lists.
If there are no document lists in the drop-down menu, your Administrator hasn't authorized you to use them yet. He can do so in the 'Access to Contact Types' tab of the 'User Management' window.
This is the 'Doc_Projects' document list:
It is almost identical in appearance to a normal Contact list, except that the name column contains the names of the documents.
You can use the list functions exactly as with a normal Contact List: you can search documents by name or by keywords, add a new document to the list, create a new group of documents, or customize the document list.
When you click on a document in the document list, the document card opens up. Just as was the case with document lists and contact lists, document cards and contact cards share more than a few similarities.
This is a document card, which describes the document named '0622-2.dwg'.
Although it might seem odd that a document has an Address, or a Phone Number, you don't have to take the name of a field into account when you write something in it. On the image shown above, the 'Address' field contains a short description of the file, and the Reference No. field contains its version number.
You can read a more detailed description of the fields on the Contact Card page.
The 'Show Follow-ups' button opens up the list of Follow-ups associated to this file. This feature is the same as with Contacts.
At the most basic level, the 'Download this File' and 'Upload this File' buttons work as you would expect them to work: 'download' saves the file on your hard drive, and 'upload' allows you to send the file back, if you have modified its content.
Most users can download and upload files that way, especially if there is only one user working on a particular file at any time.
However, it is important to understand how TeemWork manages files if there is more than one user working on a file.
First, when a new document card is created, by clicking on the 'Add a new File' button of the document list, there is no file attached to it. If you clicked on 'Download this file', you would receive an error message 'This file has not yet been sent to the server'.
So the first thing to do after creating a new document card is to upload the file by clicking on the 'Upload this file' button. This will be the first version of the file.
Afterwards, someone else could open up the document card, download the file, make a few modifications, and upload it back. This will be the second version of the file.
The important thing to notice is that, at this point, the both the first and second versions of the file are on the server. TeemWork never erases or overwrites any file on the server. It keeps storing the new versions of the files. This can be seen by clicking on the 'Show Uploads/Downloads' button on the document card:
The document E-012 was uploaded twice, and downloaded twice, too. Katherine Harris downloaded the first version on 2002-10-22, and the second version on 2002-10-25.
On this window, you could click on a row to download the corresponding version. This is especially useful if someone happened to upload the wrong file, by mistake.
When you click on the 'Download this file' button, TeemWork downloads the most recent version of the file on your hard drive, in the 'C:\TeemWork\TeamName\Downloads' folder (replace 'TeamName' with your team's name). You can find it by clicking on the 'My Computer' icon, on your desktop, and then clicking on the 'C drive' icon.
If you have made some modifications to the file that you have downloaded, you can upload it to the server by clicking on the 'Upload this file' button. TeemWork will then open up a dialog box asking you to select the file.