DRIVE
A drive per record, readable by your agents.
Your files live on the record they belong to, and your agents work on them with the same gestures you do.
Files live on the record
Every record carries its own drive: a folder tree that belongs to it. There is no parallel hierarchy to keep in sync next to your data, and no naming convention to enforce just to find a document again.
The same document can hang off several records without being duplicated. It is a link, not a copy: the file exists once, and it stays subject to the permissions of every record that carries it. A record you are not allowed to see never becomes a back door onto its documents.
One document, several files
A document is not always a file. An ID card has a front and a back, a contract has its signed original and its amendments. A document accumulates its files and keeps them together, in the order they arrived.
What is added is added: uploading does not rename the document and does not reshuffle what was already there. A file belongs to exactly one document, so the same piece never ends up in two places with two different histories.
The folder tree can be declared in the schema
The folders of a business are not reinvented for every client file. The schema can describe the expected tree, and the platform creates it on its own as each record is born. Your teams find the same structure everywhere, without having copied it.
A document field can also set its own conditions: which file types it accepts, the size above which it refuses. The check runs on the real type of the file, not on its extension.
Your agents get the same gestures, under the same rights
An agent walks a record's tree, opens a document and reads its content, creates a folder, files a piece into it, detaches it. These are a person's gestures exposed to a machine, and they go through the same access control: an agent only sees what the person it works for would see.
The destructive gesture is isolated and handled apart. Detaching a file from a document does not destroy it, and whatever is deleted goes to the record's archive, where it can be restored.
How it works
A client sends back their signed amendment. It has to reach the right file, in the right place, and the agent preparing the annual review has to be able to refer to it.
You drop the file on the record, by drag and drop or from the clipboard.
It becomes a document, or one more piece on an existing document.
The document is filed into a folder: the one the schema created with the record, or one you add.
Preview opens images, PDFs, audio, video and text without downloading anything.
An agent lists the record's drive, opens the document and reads it, under your permissions.
Whatever is deleted goes to the record's archive, and is restored from there.
The other pieces of this chapter