When you collaborate inside a digital workplace, all kinds of great things happen. All of your content is stored in one place, so conversations about documents are displayed with them; versions are all in one spot, kind of like Time Machine for your corporate documents; and built-in audit trails let you know if someone even looks sideways at your brand guidelines.

And because activity streams let you see what everyone is working on, you can spot those rogue PowerPoint templates and fix them before they hit the client.

Here are some tips on how to use Igloo to control content creation while enabling an open environment for collaboration.

Version Management

When you're working with multiple people to co-author a document, like an RFP response or a presentation, versions end up flying around everywhere - in email, on usb keys and in print. It's hard to track which revisions were made, who posted the latest version, and it's nearly impossible to go back in time.

Igloo built a fully automated versioning system. Anyone with permissions to write to a file can upload a new version. Version numbers are updated and all versions live in the same place as the original document. If you go to a shared URL for that document, you'll always see the latest version.

This content object has the ability to have multiple versions. You an upload a new version by clicking the version number, or selecting Versions from the Actions menu. From here you can also view the version history, including who uploaded a version and when. It's only one click to restore a previous version to the active version.

This applies to pages, too. This is a feature I use extensively on our corporate website. If we update a page layout and it introduces a bug, I can revert to a previous, working version until the problem has been solved.

Access Controls

Every channel (like a folder or blog) or team space can be set up with its own permissions. You can specify who is allowed to read, write, edit, and manage the content within. By default, content objects will inherit permissions from their channels or spaces, but you can change them on an ad-hoc basic using the Access option in the Actions menu.

For example, our Development Team space allows only developers to write, edit and manage content. We created a discussion board that allows everyone to post ideas for new product features. Since this space is open, but posting is restricted, we disabled inheritance and created a custom ruleset just for this discussion board:

Audit Trails

Audit trails allow you to track who has viewed, edited, shared, or performed any interaction, with a document. Audit trails are great for sharing content with clients.

"I didn't see that come through."

Or did you?

Follow Content

Following content allows you to receive notifications when something is added to a channel, an object has new version, someone posts a comment or downloads a document. You can specify if you want instant, daily, weekly or monthly summaries of activity.

Following content is great for mission critical content. I follow our sales contracts, so whenever a change is made, I can ensure it is consistent with the content posted to our website.

I also follow our brand content, like our logo. Whenever someone downloads a version of the logo I can follow up to ensure execution fits within our brand guidelines.

You can force-subscribe users to content objects and channels. For example, everyone inside our intranet is subscribed to our employee handbook and corporate events calendar. Any additions or changes to these objects are instantly pushed to everyone in the company.

Activity Streams

Moderation

You can enable moderated forums, blogs, folders, pages and spaces. When someone posts to a moderated channel, it gets sent to the moderator group. Here you can edit content prior to publishing, send it back for edits, or bring in new co-authors.

A great use-case for this is onboarding a new sales team. Sales reps can upload a contract for signing into our intranet, and the moderator has the opportunity to review it for any errors. Once it's approved it can be sent to the client.

Control is in your hands

Based on your need to control the flow or quality of information, Igloo has a variety of ways to create content ad-hoc but retaining the structure needed in a business environment.