Forum Discussion
Using Sharepoint as Virtual Data Room (VDR)
I am very new to SharePoint and I have been tasked to set up a VDR using SharePoint. It is for sharing and collaborating with external partners. Important features of a VDR are, but not limited to:
1) User Management and Control (User login, Login auto expiry, Assigning access permission etc)
2) Data Management and Control (Access permission, watermarking, cannot download/save, cannot print, cannot edit etc)
3) User Activity Report (when did user login, frequency of login, which files, etc)
I am not able to find much resources for this. I am wondering anyone here has any experience setting up a VDR via Sharepoint. And if you could share best practice or any advice, will be much appreciated. Many thanks in advance.
Cheers,
jw
- Here's the link to this topic: https://www.govern365.com/virtual-data-room/
Jeffrey Wong We have actually built a product that provides Virtual Data Rooms using SharePoint online. You can visit our website: www.govern365.com for more details. I have also written a post on it which will be published this week. I am not able to find a way to upload the file here but if you provide me your email ID, I can send it to you or post the link here once it is posted.
Niraj
I was facing the same problem, at that time I had used FirmsData virtual data room for sharing and collaborating the data with external partners. Free trial demo is also available. The limitation of free demo is 14 days.
Since you want to do external sharing, you will want to control the content that external users can work with. SharePoint Site Collection are a security boundary that should be used for this purpose, I typically recommend creating separate site collections for each project or client. you can then activate External Sharing when necessary. (Some projects may not need to be shared externally)
see https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Manage-external-sharing-for-your-SharePoint-Online-environment-C8A462EB-0723-4B0B-8D0A-70FEAFE4BE85 for some more details
Thanks Dean_Gross for your response. Indeed, I am intending to set up a separate site collection away from our main site, making the security and control abit more manageable.
Our VDR will contain several projects within, and we will only allow limited access to the external parties the project they are interested in. It is easy to share document externally, but the control feature in Sharepoint is very lacking. It is manageable for now when the number of users is just a few, but when the number grows, control features, like auto expiry, users management tool and content management tool, will be very helpful.
You may find Site Policies helpful, these allow you to easily close project sites when they are done, see
The account management features you mention will come from Azure AD B2B. MS has lots of plans to continue to add improvements to them
- My two cents here about where you should look at:
(1) Azure B2B
(2) IRM + Azure Information Protection
(3) Compliance & Security Center featuresThanks jcgonzalezmartin. Will do some digging at your list. Cheers,
