KB User's Guide - Documents Tab - Requesting a Document From Another Group
In the KB, you can have documents that are owned and maintained by other groups shared with your own group, making it possible for your users to easily access that existing content without recreating it for your group. This page describes how to find and request those documents.
Finding and Requesting Documents
In the KB Admin Tools, go to the Documents tab and click on the Use Docs from... link in the left navigation bar.
Upon clicking on the Use docs from... button, you will be taken to a screen called Use Documents from Other Groups. From here, you can search for documents that may be relevant to your KB site visitors.
Most of the search filters on this page will be the standard KB Admin Tools search filters described in KB User's Guide - Documents Tab - Document Searching and Sorting, with two exceptions:
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Groups - This dropdown list defaults to All other groups. If you open the dropdown, you will see a list of all active KB spaces with the institution included as a prefix.
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Age - This filter defaults to 30 days, which means that the results included on the page will be limited to documents that were created within the past 30 days. You may select age ranges between 1 day through 100 days, or to see all documents, you may also select "All Age".
Once you have the Search filters set as desired, you can begin browsing the list of matching documents. For each document, you will be presented with one of two different options in the Action column: Request or Use.
Request
For most documents, you will use the Request button to easily notify the document owner and group admin(s) that you would like the document to be shared with your group.
Clicking on the Request button will lead to a pop-up window with the Document Sharing Request Form. If desired, you can enter a message in the note field explaining why you would like the document to be shared.
Click the Request share button to submit the form. This will send an email with the document ID and title, your name and email address, your group space, and your note (if provided) to the document owner and group admin(s).
Use
Clicking on the Use button allows you to publish a document directly to your internal KB site. It only appears for documents where the owning group has assigned a topic to the document that has the Public share setting enabled. To learn how the Public share function is enabled/disabled, please refer to Adding Topics: Public Share.
Once you click on the Use button, the document will display in edit mode. Most of the fields and settings are grayed out and subsequently are not editable. However, there are several features you can use to customize the document for your audience, which you can read about here.
Please note that you will only be able to use this option to publish a document to your internal site. If you wish to have the document shared with your external site, you will need to contact the document owner and/or group admin to request it.
Next Steps
Once the request is submitted, the document owner and group admin will receive an email. The request will also appear in the owning group's space on the Share Requests under the Documents tab. The document owner will then click on the Take action link at the far right.
The Document Owner can leave a note for the Requester and either Approve or Decline the request, which will trigger an email notification to the requester. If the share request is approved, the document will appear in your group space.
