Publishing documents in a Data Room – Virtual Vaults Help Center

Publishing gives Admins control to decide when uploaded documents can become visible to buyers.

When users on the sell side upload documents to a Data Room, those documents are not automatically visible to buyers. Publishing acts as a safety gate that prevents documents from being seen by buyers until you are ready to share them.

Note: The publishing feature is available from the Standard plan. For Basic, documents are published automatically on upload and publish controls are not visible in the interface.

How publishing works

When a document is uploaded or moved into a folder, it automatically inherits that folder's permissions. Those permissions only come into effect when the document is published. Until then, the document is not visible to any buyer role.

Only Admins can publish documents. Managers and Contributors do not have publish capabilities.

Unpublished folders and documents are marked with a forbidden icon, making them easy to identify. See the example below:

Note: Moving a published document into an unpublished folder will unpublish it.

Publishing documents manually

In the list view:

1. Select one or more documents using the checkboxes

2. Choose Publish from the action bar at the top
In the tree view:

1. Open the action menu on the document or folder

2. Choose Publish

To find all unpublished documents quickly, use the unpublished filter in tree view.

Auto-publish

Auto-publish is a Data Room setting that Admins can turn on or off. When enabled, documents are published automatically on upload. This means that their permissions come into effect immediately.

Even with auto-publish enabled, Admins can choose to publish manually on upload if needed.

When auto-publish is turned ON: Documents become visible to buyers straight away after upload (based on their folder permissions).
When auto-publish is turned OFF: Documents stay hidden after upload until an Admin manually publishes them.

To configure auto-publish

Admins can turn auto-publish on or off in the Data Room settings:

1. Open the Data Room and go to Settings

2. Navigate to Features

3. Find Auto-publish uploads and toggle it on or off

DR turn on off auto publish settings.png

Unpublish folders or documents

When a document or folder has been published, but you would like to revoke and remove access to it, you can unpublish it.

Admins may need to unpublish documents for several reasons, such as correcting a document that was published by mistake, temporarily removing a document to update permissions, or staging disclosure by hiding documents until the buyers can see it again. Unpublishing gives you control to reverse accidental publishing and manage what buyers can see at each stage of the transaction.

This can be done in two ways, depending on your view in the Documents section. Follow the steps below to unpublish items:

In the list view:

1. Select one or more folders / documents using the checkboxes

2. Choose Unpublish from the action bar at the top

3. Confirm the action by clicking on 'Unpublish'
In the tree view:

1. Open the action menu on the document or folder

2. Choose Unpublish from the menu to the right

3. Confirm the action by clicking on 'Unpublish'