Sharing With One Person
Sometimes one person needs one document and has no business seeing the case it is attached to. A grant does that without widening anything.
Where to find it
On a document, the Sharing panel — administrators only. It lists existing grants, live links and every route by which somebody reaches the document.
Why it exists
Before grants, the only way to let the auditor see a contract was to attach it to a record they could read — which gave them everything else on that record too — or to e-mail a copy out of the system entirely. Both are worse.
A grant adds. It never subtracts.
The union rule is the floor. Somebody who can already read a linked record still can, whatever the grants say, and there is deliberately no “deny”.
A deny would make the answer to “can this person read it” depend on the order two rules were evaluated in, and the first time that produced a surprise it would be a disclosure or a refusal nobody could explain.
It cannot reach past a classification
Clearance is tested before any route, so granting a document to somebody without the clearance for it does nothing at all.
Read is not download
A grant is read or download. A read grant lets somebody look and not take a copy, which is the entire point of lending a document to an auditor.
It caps the download only where the grant is that person’s sole route. Somebody who can already reach the document through a case they work on is not made worse off by also being granted it.
A team, not just a person
A grant to a security group follows the group: somebody joining it gains the document and somebody leaving loses it, with nobody reissuing anything.
Revoked, not deleted
Revoking records when and by whom, and the row stays. “Who could see this, and between which dates” is the question after an incident, and a deleted row answers it with silence.
An expiry date does the same job without anybody having to remember.
Worked example
An external auditor needs three contracts from a procurement case they are not on. Each is granted to them at read with a six-week expiry and a reason. They can open all three and download none, the grants lapse on their own, and the register still shows the arrangement a year later.
Recommendations
- Always set an expiry for anything time-boxed. It is the only control that works unattended.
- Write the reason. Afterwards the question is never “was there a grant” but “why”.
- Grant to a team when the answer is really a role.
- Prefer a grant to an attachment when only the document is meant to be shared.