Documents would be wildly more useful if we could use them to store hyperlinks: basically the link would not initiate a download, it would just send the link to the user's default browser. This would allow users to, for instance, easily record a relevant online article about the customer (example number 1 in the Documents documentation), but it would be most useful for working documents: most organizations these days are using collaborative document systems, either Google Drive or Office 365 (probably there are others?), and most other workplace tools, whether operations scheduling, customer research, grant management, etc. are also collaborative web applications these days. The whole download file>edit>upload new file over old file>delete local copy to prevent confusion process is unwieldly and rarely practiced diligently, and with no real version management built in particularly fraught. I doubt many organizations use the Documents feature much, we certainly don't for all the above reasons.
Two issues immediately come to mind:
- Security: I don't expect there to be a significant security concern with this: in Tessitura the link is inert, the call to send the link to an external browser is no different to external links in any other tool or even within the browser itself. If the link operates from Tessitura Web, perhaps some effort to be sure than the usual "calling context/previous page" information is stripped out or obfuscated.
- Remote client->local environment transfer: Here I'm less clear, I don't know how easy (or possible) it is to execute a link on the user's local machine rather than the virtual machine used by TNHS or many locally hosted shops client distribution setup. Perhaps in the client on a hosted system links could be set to copy to clipboard on being clicked if this is not possible, while local clients or Tessitura Web would allow direct clicks.
Links are ephemeral, of course, and that is nothing new or unexpected. But a bonus feature might be the option to also save a file on the same "row" as the link to represent a saved copy of the content. This would just be any file (but presumably most likely a PDF or DOCX printed from the page in the link), with the date of the upload to register when the "snapshot" was presumably taken.
Any additional ideas or concerns for this functionality? Please add a comment!