Totally Flexible Access Control

With M-Files, you can control access permissions for entire classes of documents or for individual documents or even for different versions of the same document. You can do this using Roles, or Access Control Lists or simple User Groups. Access Control can also be regulated as a function of Workflow state or Metadata values.

M-Files ensures that information is available to the people who need it, and inaccessible and invisible to those who do not or who are not authorized to access it.

USE CASE: Human Resources

For example, employment agreements can be tagged to selected employees, making the agreement visible to that user, their supervisor and the HR department, but no one else. In the case of a management or organization change, just change the supervisor property of the employee and all related documents become visible to the new supervisor.

USE CASE: Project Management

A project-based scenario could consist of using project objects that have project team members defined with metadata. Permissions of documents and other objects can then be set by tagging them with the project to which they are associated such that they are visible only to members of the project team. This approach simplifies o-nboarding new team members, and also makes it easy to allow external users such as partners and customers to securely access project-related documentation and participate in related processes and workflows.

Faceted Permissions

M-Files also supports the concept of “faceted permissions.” In other words, multiple metadata properties together can define the effective permissions of a document or data object. In the project-based scenario above, for instance, if permissions are based on project group members, it’s possible to make certain document types, such as an agreement or contract, visible only to project managers of the related project.
Further, permissions can be version specific; different versions of a document can be displayed to different audiences based on its metadata such as workflow state. Draft documents, or earlier versions, are typically available to a smaller audience before publishing to a larger group or the general public.

Compliance and Privacy

In regulated and quality-intensive industries where audits by customers, vendors and regulating bodies are the norm, in addition to consistently establishing and enforcing access control policies, M-Files enables businesses to easily prove they are following required procedures and are in compliance with regulations and industry standards.