Managing lockers

Maarten Truyens Updated by Maarten Truyens

ClauseBuddy strongly encourages you to create different lockers — e.g., one for your Corporate Department, one for your Employment Department, and one private locker for each individual legal expert. For compliance reasons, you want to strongly consider setting up a private server, or subdivide a department into "sub-lockers".

You need to be an administrator in order to create, update or delete lockers. An administrator can then define, for each locker, which users are allowed to upload or remove content from a locker.

Types of lockers

ClauseBuddy allows you to create different types of lockers, with different security layers. After all, unlike storing templates and model clauses, lockers may host documents containing significant amounts of confidential or personal data.

  • The standard lockers, from all ClauseBuddy users, are collectively stored on ClauseBase's dedicated locker servers. While the security of those standard lockers is really good — and on par with what many other online services offer — the security setup will probably not meet the requirements of your compliance team due to the shared storage facility used.
    Even so, you can obviously use the standard lockers to experiment with Clause Hunt, or for storing documents that contain no confidential data (such as templates and precedents from which all confidential data has been stripped).
  • If you use the paid version of ClauseBuddy, you can also create private lockers managed by your own IT-team, on your own servers, e.g. in a data centre of your choice. This will prevent anyone — including the ClauseBase team — from accessing your data, even during the uploading phase. Very few online software products offer this facility, and your compliance team will be delighted to hear about this.
    We use standard database-technology at the server side — our real magic lies within ClauseBuddy — so that the private server can generally be installed in a matter of a few minutes by an experienced IT-expert.
    Send us an email if you are interested in the technical details of this setup.
Irrespective of whether you are using the standard lockers or the private lockers, please bear in mind that Clause Hunt is designed to quickly allow you to search for inspiration. Do not use it as a document archive or case management system; do not treat it as an exhaustive source of information; and only upload copies of documents that you also store elsewhere.

Managing lockers

Lockers can be managed by clicking on the small triangle at the right of the locker selector, and selecting the Manage... option.

You will then see the following dialog box, containing a list of all your lockers at the left side.

Creating a new locker

To create a new standard locker, you click on the big green plus icon, configure the new locker, and click on the Apply button.

  • The label should contain a friendly description of your locker (e.g., "Commercial Templates" or "Mary Johnsson's Documents") — if relevant even translated into different languages.
  • While you can create lockers in different languages, each individual locker is mono-lingual, and should therefore contain only documents in the same language, otherwise your search performance will degrade (e.g., because the software will use stopwords and word variations in the wrong language). In the Documents language box, you should therefore select the language for the documents that will be uploaded into the locker.
  • In the Access-bundle box you should select an access-bundle, to define who gets access to a certain locker, and who can upload / remove documents from a locker. Users need "Read & Use" rights to search in lockers, and need "Edit" rights in order to upload or remove documents from a locker.
Editing an existing locker

To edit an existing standard locker, you click on the ... at the right-side, and select Settings

Note that, while you can edit the label and access-bundle of a locker at any time, you cannot change the documetns language of the locker. If you chose the wrong language, you will have to remove the locker and create a new one.

Deleting a locker

You can delete a locker by clicking on the ... at the right side, and then selecting Delete.

You will have to confirm that you truly want to delete the locker, because this process will irreversibly delete all your documents in it.

Adding a private server

Private servers (i.e., those managed by either your own IT-department) are not configured in the lockers dialog box, but instead in the dedicated preferences panel.

Upon first use, this panel will be empty, because you will have to add one or more private server credentials to it first.

Adding private server credentials

To add credentials for a private server with private lockers, click on the green + Server button and fill in the credentials you received from your IT-department. As you can see in the screenshot below, there are different usernames and passwords for consulting/browsing a locker, adding/removing documents from a locker and locker administration (i.e., adding/remove and configuring lockers).

Setting up the private server itself is obviously outside the scope of this manual. Even though it can be done in a few minutes time, this should be done by knowledgeable IT-experts. Please have your IT-department contact us directly for setup instructions and documentation about the security layers on the private servers.

You will not receive an encryption key from your IT-department. This key is used by ClauseBuddy to encrypt the server credentials before they are sent and stored on ClauseBase's servers, so that no one — not even the ClauseBase team — can get access to the server's credentials without that key.

  • That encryption key can be chosen by you, although it should be sufficiently strong, otherwise you get a warning (e.g., not something like "password123").
  • You should distribute the encryption key to all your users, to allow their instance of ClauseBuddy to decrypt the encrypted credentials of your private server, that will be sent by the ClauseBase server to your users upon login.
While you should be careful not to distribute the encryption key outside your organisation, please note that the encryption key itself is not enough to get access to the documents stored in the lockers. Your IT-team may configure your private server in such way that it will briefly communicate with the ClauseBase-server to check whether a user should indeed receive access.
Adding lockers to private servers

Once you have configured the credentials for your private server, you should add one or more lockers. The procedure is exactly the same as for the standard lockers, as described above.

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