Share Links

A Share Link is a web-only feature that lets you grant access to specific files or folders to someone outside your site. With a Share Link, you decide whether visitors are allowed to download files, upload to a folder, or have full access (uploading, downloading, renaming, and deleting). Recipients follow the link to a web page where they only see and do what you've permitted.

While many business-critical file exchanges rely on systems automatically transferring files between other systems, sometimes you need to exchange files without a regular schedule. This is known as ad hoc sharing.

Onboarding and off-boarding users for one-time or short-term file exchange isn't always feasible because it requires too much time, and a limited number of staff have the necessary administration privileges.

Share Links provide human-centric, web-based, ad hoc methods of exchanging files with people who are not users in your account. In the world of MFT (Managed File Transfer) this capability is often referred to as Ad Hoc File Transfer.

Administrators enforce security requirements to protect your organization from shadow IT solutions and risky personal file sharing practices while still meeting your users' requirements for ease of use.

Share Links support a dizzying array of options to customize the behavior to meet your needs, whether you want to distribute files or receive them, either with an unknown public audience or only trusted contacts. The following use cases represent only a few of the many ways our customers use Share Links.

Example Use Case: Previewing Confidential Images

In this example, you want to share some images with an external contact, but you don't want them to download the files. To accomplish this, you would create a Share Link that allows visitors to preview the contents that are shared with them.

To make things secure, assign a password to the Share Link, enable access control for the link, and share your link through email invitations generated by the platform. Your images are protected against someone discovering your link address or the email being forwarded.

Assign a clickwrap to your link, which will require your contact to agree to the terms of the clickwrap before gaining access to the files. Their agreement will be tracked, along with the information about when they agreed.

To guard against visitors taking screenshots of your confidential files, configure your link to apply a watermark to every preview, including the email of the person the files were shared with.

Example Use Case: Sending Files Too Big for Email

In this scenario, you want to provide access to a file on your computer that is larger than the typical email attachment limit (usually 25MB), but you don't want this file stored within your Files.com site long-term.

To achieve this, you'll create a Share Link and attach the file directly to your link without first uploading it into your site. This creates a "snapshot" share link, where the file is copied to a hidden directory of your site.

Configure the link's security options to require a password and only allow people who follow the link from an email invitation to access the file.

Use the expiration date setting on your link to make the file available for a short period of time, and set the think the automatically expire after the file has been downloaded once.

When your contact downloads the files, or the link expires, the large file that was copied to hidden storage is automatically deleted from that hidden storage.

Example Use Case: Accepting Film Festival Submissions

For this example, you wish to accept submissions for a film festival submissions from a variety of sources. People who upload their files to you don't see any of the files uploaded by others, and you don't know ahead of time who will be submitting files to you.

Create a Share Link for a folder and set it to allow uploads only. Customize the link URL key to something that matches your intended purpose ("filmfestival") (giving you a link URL containing that key - https://mycompany.files.com/f/filmfestival). If you've customized your account domain, that custom domain will be used for the link.

Collect the standard registration information from your submitters (full name, email, company), and even use a custom registration form to capture non-standard information (the name of the project). Add a clickwrap to display rules for the film festival that participants must agree to before they upload their screeners. The text is stored, along with all of their other registration info and the date and time they accessed the link.

Your link organizes the uploaded files into sub-folders, which are automatically named with the name of the project, the submitter's email or any other of the fields you collected from your custom registration form. This allows multiple submissions from the same person to be kept separate.

To prevent your hopeful participants from contacting you to ask "Did you get my files?", enable upload receipts for your Share Link. With upload receipts enabled, your submitters receive an email listing the files that were uploaded along with any answers they provided in the registration form.

If you have a staff member responsible for monitoring the submissions and processing them, configure a Share Link notification for that user, and they'll be automatically notified each time a new submission is received.

If there's a strict deadline on when submissions must be received, configure the expiration date for your link. Visitors who attempt to access your link address after that expiration date will see a message that the link is not available. Customize the message that would be displayed, allowing you to funnel the potentially unhappy would-be participants to a single point of contact within your organization.

Example Use Case: Shared Data Room

In this example, you are collaborating on a project with external contacts. Both you and your contacts will need to upload and download files as you iterate.

Create a Share Link for one or more folders related to your project, and configure it to allow visitors to both upload and download. If it's appropriate for the external contact to delete files as well, configure the link to allow full access instead.

To ensure only your desired contact has access to the data room, add a password to your link, turn on access control, and generate an email invitation to share the link with your contact.

When your contact accesses the link, they'll be able to perform all of the file management you've granted access for. When you make changes in the link's folders, your contact will immediately see those changes.

Example Use Case: Document Collaboration

This scenario is another example of collaboration with external contacts, specifically for common business files: documents, spreadsheets, presentations.

Some pre-requisite settings must be configured to enable co-authoring within Share Links. Either the Files.com editor or Microsoft Office for Web must be enabled in your site's Online Editor Integration setting. If no editor is enabled, you will not be able to collaborate on documents with Share Link visitors. Once an editor is chosen, update your settings to enable the Use Online Editor for Full Access Share Links setting.

Create a Share Link for the folder with your work document files and configure it to allow full access, including download, upload, modify, and delete.

Add a password to your link, turn on access control, and generate email invitations to share the link with your contacts. This ensures that only your desired contacts access the link.

When visitors access the link, they'll be able to preview and edit the documents directly within their browser. Any changes they make will be instantly available to you, and your changes will be immediately reflected for them, too.

Example Use Case: Download and Submit to An Inbox

In this scenario, you have a PDF order ticket that needs to be downloaded by your customers and then uploaded along with other files to be printed. You want to use an existing Inbox for the upload submissions.

Create a Share Link that contains the PDFs to be downloaded, and configure it to allow visitors to download from the link.

In the settings for your link, you associate the desired Inbox with your Share Link.

Other settings for the link allow you to add descriptive text that will be avilable to your web visitors. Take this a step further by embedding the share link within your own custom web page on your own site, or any other domain. The transfers are still secure, no matter where the link is embedded.

Example Use Case: Soliciting Project Bids

In this scenario, you want to publish a project specification and share it with many potential contractors to bid on the project.

Create a Share Link containing the project specification and configure it to allow visitors to download the files.

In the settings for your link, enable access control and use the share groups to send email invitations to all of the relevant contact emails in one step.

To automatically track which of your contacts have not accessed the link, require registration from your visitors. If you're using the standard registration form, your visitors won't need to enter any information to view the files, because their names, company and contact will be automatically stored when they access the link from their invitation email. Your staff have access to view the email invitations that have not registered and update contact lists as needed to remove defunct addresses.

Alternatives to Share Links

Share Links are a powerful tool for ad hoc and human-centric file exchange, but that doesn't always make them the appropriate solution in every situation.

Inboxes

The most important difference between Share Links and Inboxes is that Inboxes are permanent, and never expire. Share Links are designed for temporary use. If you want to make a public upload webpage available for a long period of time use an Inbox for that upload instead.

Inboxes are intended only for collecting files, but Share Links allow access to multiple folders and files, allowing visitors to download or upload or both.

Site Administrators and users with admin rights for a folder create and manage Inboxes. If you want other users to create their own upload links, use Share Links. To ensure that uploads from web visitors only occur in specific folders in your site, use Inboxes to define where those uploads will go.

Inboxes allow people to submit files through email. Share Links only work with web submissions. If you'd like to enable email uploads, use an Inbox configured to accept emails.

Public Hosting

Share Links allow you to create a listing of files and folders for public access, especially if you embed it within another site and disable password protection. However, such a link still requires a human to access the page and download files. If your aim is to allow remote scripts to access your files via the web, use Public Hosting instead of Share Links.

User Accounts

Share Links support full access for web visitors, providing an experience much like the Files section of the web interface, but with less work than onboarding your contacts as users of your Files.com site. However, certain features of user accounts are not supported by Share Links, and creating user accounts makes more sense for certain cases.

Users receive automatic email notifications. If you are sharing files with an external party on a regular, recurring basis, it's often desirable to automatically send notifications when there are new files for them to download. Email notifications are only sent to users and user groups; to take advantage of automated notifications, your counterparty must have a user account for your site.

User accounts support advanced authentication and two-factor authentication methods, while Share Links only support password authentication. If your organization requires two-factor authentication for all file exchange, you'll need to create Users rather than using Share Links.

User accounts connect in multiple ways (web, API, SDK, CLI, protocol-based file transfer, desktop apps, and mobile apps), while Share Links only allow file transfers through a web page. If your contacts need any other supported methods, create a User account for them.