Sharing Beacon Documents with Other Users

Last updated Tuesday May 25th, 2021 at 5:08:55 PM GMT+0000

Beacon supports a number of ways to share content with other users, including the ability to designate write access to users. These sharing options are only available to documents that are stored in Beacon's cloud. For documents stored on your computer, they can be shared using traditional means such as Dropbox or Google Drive, however the encrypted content inside the document will not be available to other users.

The Sharing Panel

Open the sharing panel using the share button in the toolbar of an opened cloud document.

Sharing via Link

The top section labeled Read-Only Access contains a link that can be shared however you feel like. Use the Copy button to quickly copy the entire link. It can be posted to web forums, Discord, sent via email, or even text messages. It works like any other link.

The shared document will not contain any private data, such as deployment servers and anything encrypted inside the Custom Config Content editor. It will be updated as you update your file in the cloud.

Sharing to the Community

The middle section is used for sharing the document with the Community tab in Beacon's Documents Drawer and on the Browse Community Files section of the website.

To request your document be shared, just click the Share button. Sharing requests require approval. To increase the chances of approval, make sure your document has a good description in your document's Document Properties section. Duplicated (or very similar) descriptions will not be approved.

If your document is approved, you may stop sharing at any time using the same button, which will be labelled Unshare instead.

Just like sharing via a link, private data will not be available to other users.

Sharing Write Access

For teams of admins, sharing a single file can make life much easier. Files shared in this manner contain all the encrypted data and deployment servers. This means a head admin could share the file with sub-admins who would have the ability to restart the server without the head admin giving out their Nitrado account information.

Only the document owner may change who has write access to the file.

There are three ways to add a user to a document.

Add Via Email Address

Press the Add User button and enter the email address of the user's Beacon account. This does not email the user a link and the user's account must already exist.

Add Via User UUID

Adding a user by their UUID is accurate and does not require the user to have a Beacon account, though their Cloud and Community features must be enabled.

First, the user must open the Tools drawer and double-click the Identity option.

Inside the Identity panel is a User ID field. The full value of that field is needed to add the user.

The value in the Private Key area should never be shared with anybody. Ever. Not even Beacon tech support. Seriously.

Once you have the UUID of the desired user, press Add User and enter the UUID.

If there is an error, check the UUID. If the UUID is correct, that means the user has their Cloud and Community features turned off. The user should open the Menu drawer with The menu button and click the Enable Cloud & Community link. Once that is done, try adding the user again.

Add Via Username

Adding a user by their username must be done with the full username, which includes an 8-character identifier after their name. The easiest way to find the correct value to enter is on the user's control panel.

The username with identifier tag will be shown at the top of the user's control panel.

Press the Add User button and enter the value to continue.

After Adding a User

Once a user has been added to the document, press the Done button. You must save your document before the changes will take effect. Beacon will remind you of this any time you make changes to the authorized users. This is because Beacon must add to your document an encrypted value for each authorized user. There's no way for that to happen until the file is saved.

Now that the file has been shared and saved, the file will appear in each user's Documents Drawer under the Cloud tab. Each user may open, edit, and save the document as if it were their own.

Be careful to avoid multiple users editing the document at once. If User A saves the document while User B is still working on it, when User B saves the document, User A's changes would be reset. Beacon is unable to merge changes made by users.