With the variable Document needs of organizations, SharePoint works as a collaboration center for various people catering to their needs via the same document. Take the example of a scenario where an appraisal of an employee is to be sent to the HR department as well as to the employee-boss and a copy is to be saved for future purposes as well. In this, three different copies of the same document exist in multiple places cluttering the data space available. With the Sharepoint document library, you can do so via simply uploading the documents to it and giving share access to required persons.

At the very first, you need to create a simple Sharepoint document library with the columns that you need along with a specific column where you can store the sharing URL of the file. Then, go to ‘Versioning Settings’ in Settings to enable the ‘content approval for submitted items’ to prevent unauthorized editing. Now as corporate documents are very sensitive, we could do well with adding of some extra security measures. For this, open the ‘Permissions for this document library’ option on the settings page. In the page that opens, click upon the ‘Stop Inheriting permissions’ option.

Now your document library is ready for use, upload any file of your choice from your system. To share this file with other people, click on the Share option which will open a mini window containing your sharing URL. You can modify file editing permissions here and more. This sharing URL doesn’t change for as long as that file is uploaded in your document library making it possible for anyone to access it anytime. Its recommended deselecting ‘allow editing’ option which you will get by opening the ‘People in your organization with the link can edit’ option.

Now before you can send this file to people for viewing, you need to take care of a couple other things as well. Select the file and modify its metadata from the right side of the screen. Here you can see the approval status of the file which should be pending. When you newly upload a file, its pending status if by default pending which means the persons with access to its URL can’t see it. For the files which were approved once, but then some changes were made to them and now their status is pending, people can only see the version before changes were made.

To make the file visible to others, you need to click on three dots icon beside file name and scroll down to more option in it where you will see the Approve/Reject option. Selecting this option will make the file visible to those having shareable URL or direct access to the library. Now you just need to explain the workings in brief to your team and the file status changes. Then you can simply provide shareable URLs to each and everyone those needs them.

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