Stay in Control Your workspace is a very important place: it contains your work and you have a responsibility to ensure its properly secured and controlled. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t open up securely. Proper access management is required so that we can separate the two main types of users: your team’s members and external contributors. The latter could be a person from within your organization or from the public. There may be more types of roles available depending on the platforms, but these are the main buckets we think of when working in the open. Depending on the platform you use, various controls may be offered to let you openly share your documents and your work while remaining in control of its content. In SharePoint, a platform most often available as “Inner Source” only, a team can open up their workspace by default to their colleagues and create specific folders with more restricted access to privately work on documents only when absolutely required. With most collaboration platforms, whether it’s SharePoint, Google Docs, etc., there usually is an option to let external contributors consult your documents and add comments but prevent them from making changes directly. This way, you remain in control of the main version but you enable people to stop by and provide feedback on a continuous basis. Additionally, such platforms usually offer a functionality that let the owner of the documents revert changes made by someone else, ensuring that only approved changes remain on your official versions that will be kept for information management purposes.