Manager Toolkit: 8 Tips to Enhance Your New Document Library

In the past few months’ Manager Toolkit series, you’ve been learning more about how to increase your community outreach through our communications platform.  This month, we discuss the new document library and how you can enhance the document management experience for your team members and enable secured access to community members.  

The features in the new document library give more flexibility and granularity to the file-specific actions you can take.  To help you succeed in building an easily navigatable document library for your residents, we’ve put together a list of the top eight tips.

1) Assign user roles to designate responsibilities in your company

Designating user roles in a software system in such a way that it aligns with your staff’s responsibilities gives more focus and meaning to the goals your staff is trying to accomplish.  In Pilera, we’ve added company and community-specific user roles to help increase accountability, enhance security, and provide better flexibility to your staff. We’ve added new company and community-specific roles that pertain to the new document library.  You can assign the company file library manager role to those individuals in your company who will handle the document library across the portfolio as well as community file library manager roles to the individuals who will administer file library actions for the communities they manage.

2) Structure your folders for easy organization

Developing a good folder structure/hierarchy involves organizing folders in a way that is easy for other community managers to add files in and manage.  In the new document library, managers can now create as many folders and subfolders as they need to give their team and residents easier document management and retrieval experience.  

3) Grant or restrict file access through permissions

An important part of structuring your folders is setting permissions.  This is important so that you can grant or restrict access to the files in the folders.  There are four resident types you can grant or restrict permission to. These include board members, owners, tenants, and other occupants. Folder permissions ensure that only the residents you want to give access to documents will be able to view them in the resident portal.

4) Upload multiple files at once

To save time, you can upload many files to a folder at once.  In Pilera, the number of files you can have in your document library is unlimited.

5) Share files to multiple communities

If many communities need access to the same documents, you can quickly share the file while retaining file consistency throughout.  Sharing files from one community to many more saves time by eliminating the need to upload replica files multiple times.

6) Replace an existing file with a new one

You may need to regularly update an existing file in the document library for many reasons: 1) As the business evolves, you have more information to share 2) To correct previously added information.  You can simply upload a new version of the existing file and the change will propagate to all other communities in which you have shared this file.

7) Use Company-level Folders to distribute content to your communities

Using the company or portfolio-level folders in Pilera is a great way to maintain the characteristics (such as name and description) of your original file while sharing that file with multiple communities.  One such example is a Company Policy file that needs to be distributed to board members in each community. There are many benefits to using a company-level folder: 1) The original file you share to multiple communities retains its name and description even if you upload a new version.  2) Files can be controlled and retained at the admin level in the event you no longer manage a specific community. 3) It gives managers an easier way to organize the files they will be sharing to their communities.

8) Notify community members of new files

In the new version of the document library, you can inform residents of files in three different ways within Pilera that give you better control over who sees your message.  These include the ability to notify residents by user role (board member, owner, tenant, or other-occupant), by location in Send Announcements area, and to one or multiple select residents in the Send Messages area.    

We hope you enjoyed going through this list of best practices to take your document management to the next level.  We’ll be back with more tips on how to best use various features in Pilera for your HOA’s and condos. Until next time, take a look at our other articles from the Manager Toolkit Series.  Enjoy!