6 Capabilities Key to B2B File Sharing Success

Many companies share files and data with clients and partners daily. Whether you need to share vital financial information with investors, publish metrics to clients, or exchange security documents to satisfy a compliance audit, successful commerce depends on the secure sharing of your files. Not all file-sharing solutions are equal, however. Keep these six capabilities in mind while evaluating what’s right for your organization.

• Scale and efficiency: Sharing documents regularly with hundreds if not thousands of clients is different than sharing documents episodically with a small number of partners. For example, if you are a vendor to financial institutions and you want to send out operational metrics then you know the pain of manually compiling the files and uploading them to different client systems (email, portals, FTP, etc.). Since everything is manual, it is easy to make errors. Further, responding to ad-hoc requests and making sure the clients have the correct file versions can be inefficient.
• Central file library: Many times, you create client-specific folders because that client needs some files that are not relevant to others. But what happens to the common files? You end up creating copies of the file in each client-specific folder. To update the file, you have to manually find all the folders where this file exists and update the folders one by one. What you need is a central file library of unique files. The files can then be pulled into many folders. Updating the central file library automatically updates all the outlying folders.
• Easy navigation of previously shared files: Many files such as metrics, reports, and financials have to be shared with clients on a recurring basis. You and your clients should be able to easily navigate between files for the previous periods.
• Integrated collaboration: You want all external collaboration on the files to remain within the system in context of the files that are exchanged. This eliminates the need to exit to the solution to understand what questions your partners or clients asked about a file.
• Positive partner/client user experience: When you share documents with clients you want the client to have a seamless experience. It’s a prime opportunity to provide a value-added service and make your brand look good. A full-featured experience for your clients will also increase adoption rate, which in turn reduces the instances where you must communicate with them outside the system.
• User access and controls: Enterprise-level files have sensitive data and not all internal users should have access to all files. You need a system that has all the levers to provide granular access controls for data privacy and security.

Most virtual data rooms, cloud-based file sharing products, SharePoint-like document management systems, and business sharing portals provide some of these capabilities. CENTRL, the inter company network, is the only solution to combine all of these capabilities and more into a centralized platform.