Sharing Overview

SmarterMail gives users the ability to share several things with other people within their organization. This includes primary resources as well as secondary resources. For example, SmarterMail creates default calendars, contact lists (address books), task areas and more. These can be shared, but any new "folder" you create — a new calendar, a new tasks area, etc. — can also be shared, all on its own. For email folders, parent folders can be shared along with any sub-folders created within the parent, or individual child folders can even be shared individually. This all makes collaborating with co-workers within your organization extremely simple, as well as extremely flexible.

Users can share the following areas with other organizational members:

Email Folders - parent folders as well as child (sub) folders. (The Drafts and Scheduled folders are the exceptions; they can't be shared.)
Calendars - primary and secondary
Contact Lists / Address Book - primary and secondary
Tasks - primary and secondary
Notes - primary and secondary

SmarterMail also gives domain administrators the ability to create Public Folders. These are domain-level folders — Contacts, Calendars, Tasks, or Notes — that can be shared with users and user groups across the domain. These can be used by multiple people — such as a Sales or Marketing Department — for organizing and standardizing a calendar or even tasks.

That leaves areas like Online Meetings, News feeds and File Storage as the only areas without conventional sharing options. However, both online meetings and File Storage are collaborative by their very nature. So, they can be "shared", just not the same way as contacts, tasks, etc.

How to Share

There are a couple of different ways to share items: from within an area itself — right-clicking a folder or using the folder icon and selecting Share Folder — or from the Sharing page in your user settings. Either way, the Share Folder window is the same, and the process is: pick the people or groups, assign each a permission level, and save.

When you create a share, the recipient is notified by email (e.g., "jdoe@example.com has shared a calendar with you"). The shared item then appears on the Shared With Me tab of their Sharing settings, where they choose whether to Attach it. Attaching is what makes the shared item actually appear in their webmail — in the folder list, calendar list, etc. This is deliberate: it means nobody's interface fills up with items they didn't ask to see. Likewise, a recipient can Detach a share at any time to remove it from their view without affecting the share itself, and if you revoke a share, it simply disappears for everyone you'd shared it with.

Sharing Individual Folders

Whether you're sharing an email folder, a calendar, a task list, or any other item, the process is essentially the same. The only real difference is that SmarterMail allows you to share individual email folders versus calendars, task folders, etc. which are, essentially, all-or-nothing shares as there aren't any embedded items in those areas. For example, email folders can contain sub-folders, which can then contain their own sub-folders — and when sharing an email folder, a "Share all subfolders with these permissions" toggle lets you include everything beneath it in one step. Calendar and Task folders are self-contained and do not have any sub-folders.

Regardless of how you get to a folder's sharing option, you're presented with the following:

Users - This area allows you to share the item with one or more users, and each user you add to the share can have their own permission level. These are:

None - This permission acts as a "negater" and is, therefore, only available for users. For example, let's say you have a User Group set up for your Marketing Department. However, you don't want to share Notes with Henry because he ate your piece of cherry pie last week. You add Manage access for the Marketing Department user group, then add Henry's username under Users and set his access to "None". That way, you're sharing Notes with everyone in Marketing EXCEPT Henry as you've negated his permission.
Availability - Used exclusively for calendars, this permission means that the user with this permission can see whether a person is available for scheduling purposes, but it doesn't allow for the viewing of a calendar or its appointments/events. This is ideal for people who only need to answer the question "is she free at 2:00?" without seeing what fills the rest of the day.
Read-Only - This means that the user can only view the items in the share (calendar entries, contact lists, etc.); they have no control over editing entries, adding entries, etc. A read-only share would be good, say, for a colleague who needs access to a contact list, but who doesn't need to manage those contacts in any way.
Manage - This access allows others to add, edit and/or delete any items within the share. (But, importantly, NOT the share itself.) This is the right level for a true working share — e.g., a team calendar everyone adds appointments to.
Owner - This access allows others to rename and/or delete the specific folder that's being shared. Basically, they use whatever is being shared just as if it were their own.

User Groups - This area allows you to share the item with groups of users that have been set up previously, including the built-in "Everyone" and "Administrator" groups. When sharing with a User Group, the same permission levels are available EXCEPT for None, as that is a user-only permission.

Note: If an email folder inherits its permissions from a shared parent folder, you'll see the message "Permissions cannot be set on this folder because they are defined on a parent folder." Adjust the share on the parent instead.

Internet Calendars

Calendars are a little different when it comes to sharing. For example, they have their own permission: Availability. They're also unique in that a calendar folder can be shared publicly as an internet calendar, or "web calendar" (commonly known as a "Webcal"). An internet calendar is just that: it is a calendar that can be subscribed to via a basic URL. The URL is either copied from a calendar provider — sports teams generally have their game schedules available as an internet calendar — or it's sent out to people via email. SmarterMail gives users the ability to make any of their calendar folders available as internet calendars.

To get your internet calendar URL, do the following:

First, go to the Share Folder modal by either selecting a calendar folder and right-clicking it, or using the folder icon in the calendar interface.
When the Share Folder modal opens, click on the Webcal tab. (This tab only appears for calendars.)
Toggle the setting "Allow others to subscribe to this calendar using Webcal".
The Webcal Shareable Link will appear — copy this link. (There's a handy copy icon to the right of the URL.)
Save the change.

You can then send that Webcal link to whomever you want, publish it on your website, or do whatever you want with it. And, if you decide you no longer want that calendar shared with the internet, simply repeat the steps above and disable the toggle. The calendar will cease to be shared and will be removed from the calendars of whoever used the shareable link.

Using the Sharing Page

The Sharing page in a user's settings is the central place to review everything sharing-related for an account. It's organized into three tabs:

Shared With Me - Everything other people have shared with you, including who shared it, the folder type, your permission level, and whether you've attached it. Use the Attach button to add a share to your webmail interface, or Detach to remove it from view. For example, if a manager shares a "Team Calendar" with you, this is where you attach it so it appears alongside your own calendars.
Shared With Others - Everything you've shared out, with the type, whether subfolders are included, and how many people/groups it's shared with. Click a share to edit its users and permissions, use New to create a new share, or select a share and click Stop Sharing to revoke it.
Delegation - Lists any delegates that have been given access to your account — typically set up through Outlook's delegate feature. For each delegate you can see their permission level for your Calendar, Tasks, Inbox, Contacts, and Notes, plus whether they can view items marked private. Delegates can be removed here as well.

Creating a share from this page works just like sharing from within an area: click New on the Shared With Others tab, and a New Shared Folder window opens with a Folder dropdown listing everything you have available to share — all calendars, all email folders, all address books, all notes, and all tasks. Select the item, add the Users and/or User Groups, set the permissions for each, and save.

Shares, Synchronization and MAPI & EWS

Any client connecting to SmarterMail using MAPI & EWS will have instant access to any shared resources regardless of whether those shares are attached in webmail. The MAPI & EWS protocols act differently than webmail in that both protocols automatically "see" any resource shared with the user connecting. Therefore, there may be some inconsistency between shares in webmail and in a MAPI & EWS client: a share may show in Outlook for Windows connecting via MAPI even though it doesn't appear in webmail. In those instances, the user simply needs to attach the share in webmail (on the Shared With Me tab of their Sharing settings).

When synchronizing to a mobile device, or some desktop clients, using protocols such as EAS and EWS, shared items can be available on those devices and in those clients. Each device and client acts a little differently, however, so not every shared resource may be available to you due to limitations of the device/client or even a limitation of the protocol being used. For example, when using the Gmail client on an Android device, there's no way to get shared Tasks. In addition, some clients act differently based on the type of permission given to a shared item. Generally, shared items will synchronize if the item is shared with Manage or Owner permissions, as opposed to Read-Only or Availability (for calendars). Clients such as eM Client and Outlook generally reject any share with any other permission type.

Shares via WebDAV

In a broad sense, WebDAV is a network protocol for creating interoperable, collaborative applications. In terms of a mail server, WebDAV is broken down into 2 protocols created for specific features: CalDAV for calendars, and CardDAV for contacts. Both protocols were created for collaborative software, client or server, that need to maintain, access or share specific items. (I.e., calendars and contacts, respectively.)

Both CalDAV and CardDAV are supported by a variety of different clients and applications, as well as web-based services, because they both are robust, and free, solutions for sharing items. For example, some scheduling services can connect to a user's calendar over CalDAV so that a user's availability is known by the service, and any appointments created using the service can be added to a user's calendar.

To share items via either CalDAV or CardDAV, a user simply needs the WebDAV URL for their account. Whomever that link is shared with can then use the link for calendar apps, contact apps, or even email clients so that they have access to any shares made available by the user. To find the WebDAV link, a user simply logs into their webmail account, navigates to Settings > Account, and copies the WebDAV Link on the WebDAV card.