Announcing: Document Sets (Folders) & Search!

The short version

Simul Documents now supports document sets – these are similar to traditional folders and allow you to create a workspace to collaborate in. The main benefits of documents sets are simplified permission management and better structure for your documents.

This can hide documents away and that’s where our new search engine comes to the rescue!

The longer version

Document Sets have been our most requested feature (by a long way). When collaborating on documents, it’s usually part of a project or some other logical grouping. These groupings have a distinct set or members you need to work with. You can now share a document set and members will have access to any sub-documents.

Document Sets

Let’s take a look how this can help you collaborate; to create a document set select “Add Document Set” from the new document tile:

Specify a document name:

Your document set will then appear as a tile amongst your other documents:

Document sets can be nested to create a folder hierarchy bespoke to your projects. Inviting users to collaborate on a document set is similar to sharing a document. Select the document set tile and then the “Members” tab:

Once you’ve invited a member, the user will get access to the document set and all sub-documents (in our case “Example Documents”). If we look at the members for “Example Documents” we can see that the owner has been inherited from the parent document set:

The permissions model is now a lot more flexible and you can invite users to an entire document set or just a specific document. Any sub-folders or documents can override the document set’s members if you explicitly change them.

Working with documents sets

The introduction of document sets creates the need for some additional tools to help you organize and find documents.

Moving documents

Until now, Simul has only supported “Collections” which allow users to classify a document in their own personalized view. Document Sets are shared, meaning that the structure is the same for all members who have access.

You now need to decide if a document is an independent document and everyone can classify it how they wish or to enforce some structure and add the document to a document set.

To move a document, select the “Move Document” option from the document’s tile:

You will then be presented with the options of declaring the document to be independent or to browse and select a document set:

Please exercise caution when moving documents as by design, this will impact the document’s members. If you move a document to a document set – all members of that set will gain access and vice versa when removing.

Searching for documents

Creating complex hierarchies to organize your document simplifies managing members but can make navigating to your desired document more cumbersome.

Simul now includes a search engine that not only indexes your document and document set names but allows you to search for a specific revision (see Naming Versions to take advantage).

You can search all your documents, a specific collection or document set. Navigate to the appropriate collection or document set and select the “Search documents and revisions” text in the header:

You can then input any desired search terms:

You will see a mix of documents and specific revisions in the results allowing you to directly navigate to the correct version.

Work smarter with your documents

As mentioned earlier, this functionality has been heavily requested by our users and we are delighted to be helping you work smarter with your documents.

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback!