Sharing Documents with a Group of People

June 2019

When sharing documents on OneDrive with multiple recipients you can reduce the risk of sharing material with someone you didn’t intend to, by using a two-step process: one person adds the recipients and a second person checks that these are correct. 

You can achieve this process by using a Nexus365 Teams Chat Group for granting permissions, rather than adding permissions in OneDrive. You can't achieve this in OneDrive directly as only the owner of the documents can see enough information about the people the document is being shared with to differentiate people with the same name. In a Teams Chat Group anyone in the Group can check names and email addresses, making the checking of permissions by a second person possible.

When you upload documents to the Chat Group the members of the group are granted permission to view the documents in OneDrive. You can then use a OneDrive link to notify people that the documents are available, so that they can access the documents in OneDrive rather than in the Chat Group.

Note: When you want to stop sharing documents you need to remove the permissions from OneDrive. If you delete the document from the Chat Group the permissions aren't removed from OneDrive.

Set up a Chat Group

To set up a Chat Group in Nexus365 Teams:

1. Click the Chat icon on the left of the screen
2. Click the New chat icon

Enter the names of the people you would like to share documents with. As well as the person’s name you will see their SSO login name.  

Name the group

You can name the group so that you can identify it easily and search for it. To do this click the down arrow on the top right of the screen.

Enter the group name.

Check who is in the group

To check the details of the members of the Group Chat hover over participants (1) and then move over the person’s picture or initials (2).

Any member of the group chat can see the details. If you add one of your colleagues to the chat group, they can then check the list as the second part of the two-step process. 

Add files

When you first set up a chat group you won't see the files area. To see this click the group name (1) which then brings up the files link (2). Click the files link.

1. Click Share
2. Select OneDrive to locate your files:

Share the link from OneDrive

Even though you have to add documents individually to the chat group and permissions to the documents are shown as shared on the document level rather than the folder, if you share the folder link people will be able to see the documents within the folder that you have shared with them.

Go to the folder, or individual files, in OneDrive and:

1. Click the ellipses
2. Click Copy link

You can copy and paste the link.

Add additional people

To add additional people to the Group Chat click the Add people icon on the top right of the team.

Removing Permissions

When you want to stop sharing the documents you need to remove the permissions from the documents on OneDrive (or delete the documents from OneDrive). If you delete the documents from the Chat Group the permissions won't automatically be deleted from OneDrive. Removing permissions from OneDrive doesn't delete the link to the document on the Chat Group but participants won't be able to access the document.