Using Connect Pro to Securely Share Files

  
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A common use where Connect Pro can be very useful is when you need to share or exchange files with others. While this is not a core feature of Connect Pro Meeting, this is a by product of the fact that Connect Pro rooms are persistent, meaning that when someone enters a meeting room it is in exactly the same state as when you last left it.

This is the type of feature that you may not have thought of on your own, but that you will use over and over once you understand how this works. The real benefits of using Connect Pro in this way over say, sending ZIP files over email or using an FTP server, is that you can easily share content with others inside your organization or those beyond the firewall while still maintaining control over your content and you don't even need to be in your meeting room while users are downloading files for this to work.

So that you can truly understand the usefulness of this feature, Ive set up a demo room that you can engage with. Click on the meeting image to launch the room and enter as a Guest.

Fig. 1. Screenshot of a demo room that I created to show off how this feature works. Click on the image to launch the room and enter as a guest.

Once inside the meeting room, you will be able to download files that I shared with you. Also, because I turned on the Auto-Promote to Presenter option, you will be able to upload files that you want to share with me (or any other visitor to the room) as well.

So now that you see how this feature works, lets actually jump in and create a room just like this for you.

Prerequisites

Before beginning, you should have a good understanding of how Pods work, especially the File Share pod. If you do not, visit these resources before continuing:

Create a Meeting (Adobe Captivate demo, 5:36)
Meeting Roles and User Interface Overview (Adobe Captivate demo, 7:30)
Managing Pods (Adobe Captivate demo, 4:32)
Using the File Share Pod (Adobe Captivate demo, 2:24)

Visit the Connect Pro Resource Center for more Tutorials.

Step 1: Create a Meeting Room

The first step in the process is predictably to create a new meeting. I strongly recommend that you create a new meeting for this purpose as you dont want to tie up any of your regular meeting rooms as a place to exchange files. And because you know that you will be using the room in a different way, there are some added considerations that youll want to think about when going through the Create Meeting Wizard.

Before you begin, you will want to determine how secure you want to make your file exchange room and who you will be sharing the files with. If you are sharing company confidential documents with a select few then the access model you setup will be completely different if you just want to share some files with whomever wants them, as in the example room that I created.

Begin by creating a meeting room as you normally would in Connect Pro Central. Give the meeting a name. Then use the table below as a guideline for how to fill out the rest of the New Meeting form.

New Meeting Wizard
Scenario	The files I want to share are public and can be shared freely with any user	I want to restrict who I share my files with
Use a custom URL?	Yes, a custom URL allows others to easily access your room.	No, a system generated URL will make it more difficult for non-invited users to access.
Access Setting to Use	Anyone who has the URL for the meeting can enter the room	Only registered users may enter the room (guest access is blocked)
Go to Step 2?	No, click Finish and Enter the Meeting Room, skip to the next step.	Yes, Click Next > to specify which users can access the Meeting Room
Step 2 (Select Participants)	N/A	Find the Users and/or Groups you want to share the files with and add them as particpants. If you want to allow certain users to upload documents to the room to share with you, change their User Role to Presenter. Click Next > if you wish to send an invitation email to participants otherwise click Finish and skip to the next section.
Step 3 (Send Invitations)	N/A	Select Send Invitations, optionally customize the invitation message, and click Finish to send the email.

For many users the first scenario in which you are sharing non-sensitive files freely with users both inside your organization and outside your organization will occur most commonly. This scenario is the easiest to setup, with the key being selecting the Anyone who has the URL for the meeting can enter the room access option as you do not want to prohibit non-Connect Pro users from being able to get the files.

If you choose the second scenario where you limit who can enter the room and download files, choose the Only registered users may enter the room (guest access is blocked) access option as this will require users to enter a valid Connect Pro login before being able to access the files. You will then need to go to Step 2 of the wizard and specify who can enter the room (any Participant) and who can upload files (any Presenter or Host)

Fig. 2. If you choose to restrict who can download files, you have to explicitly set who can enter the meeting room in Step 2 of the Wizard. In this example, any user in the Connect Team Group and Randah can enter and download files while Alistair can upload files as well because his user role is set to Presenter.

Step 2: Setup the Meeting Room Accordingly

Now that youve named your meeting room, decided if you want an easy to remember custom URL and specified an appropriate access model, you are ready to setup the room to enable File Sharing. Since you wont be using the room for typical meeting activities such as sharing your webcam or sharing your screen, youll want to minimize clutter and focus your attendees by hiding unused pods such as the Share Pod, the Camera & Voice Pod, and the Attendee List. Youll also need to make a File Share Pod visible on the layout. Remember that users will be entering your meeting room in whatever Layout you leave open and since they will not be hosts, they cannot change layouts, so you need to leave the room exactly how you want your attendees to view it. You might even want to delete any unused layouts to prevent the possibility of users not seeing the correct one.

Fig. 2. Hide pods that you wont need like the Attendee List and Camera & Voice Pods to minimize clutter and focus users on the task at hand, downloading your files.

A good best practice is to include a Note Pod with download instructions. Youll notice that in my example, Ive also included a virtual business card with contact info (just a JPG uploaded into a resized Share pod) and a Chat Pod, which Ive renamed to Message Board so users can leave messages for me and other users.

For your convenience, here is a set of download instructions that you can cut and paste into a Note Pod:

To download shared files to your computer follow these instructions: 1. Click on the name of the file you wish to download 2. Click Save to My Computer 3. A browser window opens with a link to initiate a download. 4. Click the link, specify a location to save the file and click OK. 5. The file is now saved to your computer.

Once you have the meeting setup, youll need to populate the File Share Pod with files. To do this:

1. Click Upload File button
2. Choose Select from my Computer... or if the content is already on the Connect Pro server, click Select from Content Library
3. In the dialog box, browse to the file you wish to upload and click OK.
   
4. Once the file is done uploading, it appears in the list.
5. Repeat until all files you wish to share are listed.

Note: In certain scenarios it may make sense to use multiple File Share Pods as a way to organize files.

Step 3: Enabling Users to Upload Files - Scenario 1 Only (Optional)

This step only applies in Scenario 1 as you would have already determined who can upload files in Step 2 of the New Meeting Wizard if you chose Scenario 2.

In the room that I set up you may have noticed that you not only had the ability to download files to your computer that I wanted to share with you but that you also had the ability to upload files to share with me (and anyone else who came to the room). This is not the default behavior, but you can enable this by simply changing one setting. Go to Meeting > Manage Access & Entry > Auto-Promote Participants to Presenters. A checkmark appears next to the option if it is enabled and anyone who enters the room is able to upload and download files. Note that these users will also be able to delete files via the Pod Options menu as well so make sure that you are comfortable extending this capability to everyone.

Fig. 3. Turn on the Auto-Promote Participants to Presenters option if you want to allow room visitors to upload files to share.

Step 4: Sharing Your Files

Now you a ready to share your files. All a user needs to access the room is the room URL so you can email it to someone recite it over the phone, include it on a web page, or any other method you deem appropriate. Because the room is persistent it will always be there until you explicitly delete or change the permissions of the room.
One thing to note is that if you start to use Connect Pro to share files often, it makes sense to turn your room into a template that you could then replicate this configuration of Pods each time you needed it instead of starting from scratch. If you do not know how to create a Meeting Template, view this tutorial.

Step 5: Monitor Visits

Once youve set up your File Share, there are a number of things you might want to track. For example, you may want to see how many times the room has been visited and by whom, when it was last visited. You can do this by visiting the meeting reports. To do this, find the meeting in Connect Pro Central and click on the title to view meeting details. Then click on the Reports link. On the summary page, youll see information such as the Most Recent Session, which in this case is the last time someone visited your File Sharing Room. If you click By Attendees youll see a complete list of who visited your room, when they visited, and for how long. This can be an invaluable tool to see who has visited the room and provides you with the opportunity to follow up with these users.

Fig. 4. The By Attendees report shows you who has visited your file share room and when they visited.

Revoking Access to Files

When you are ready to stop making these files available for download, the easiest way to do this is by taking one of three actions:
1. Enter the room and remove the files from the File Share Pod(s)
2. Enter the room and hide the File Share Pod(s)
3. Delete the meeting room all together
Taking any of these steps make the files unavailable for download.

Summary

I hope that you have found this tutorial helpful. While this is not a core use case of the product, I think that once you try this out, youll find this method superior to sharing files by insecurely emailing ZIP files or having to work with IT to create FTP logins.

Let us know what you think by leaving a comment below.