How to lock down documents

Amidst the current corona crisis, one of my clients needed a quick fix to communicate some potentially scary documents with their staff without alerting the public, and they didn’t have an intranet.

We had a brainstorm to look at the existing website capabilities without the need to setup a separate login area and to minimise admin, and DocMan from Joomlatools had the required features.

One option was to stop search engines from indexing the documents on the website. You can see here how to stop indexing.

The perhaps better option however was to also lockdown the documents completely to a user group that would only internally be granted access. So we set up a new access level with viewing permissions specifically for this type of documents. You can see how to lock down documents in DocMan here.

That way, no second system is required, and a shared internal login makes the access relatively easy.

Ultimately, a user based registration process that can enable and disable staff access is obviously the preferred solution but as a quick fix that worked for them.