The Document Management plugin allows you to create entities, categories, and subcategories to organize your documents. App users can subscribe to different entities based on preferences or relevancy, to access the most up to date information.

When a user follows a specific entity in the app, they’ll automatically get the latest updates and information for that entity whenever the documents are updated.

At any given time, your end users know that they have the most up to date versions of your documents.

The Document Manager plugin organizes content by categories. Each category will have at least one subcategory, with different documents within those subcategories.

The plugin works best when combined with the Free Text Questionnaire plugin. Questionnaires can be applied to each category, which will ultimately provide users with the latest content.

It’s a simple concept and very easy to apply. We’ll cover the step-by-step process of adding categories, subcategories, and questionnaires shortly.

Here’s a quick overview of the features involved with Document Management Plugin:

In short, the plugin will organize sets of critical documents in different categories, which makes it easy for users to navigate and get the latest information.

The Document Management Plugin is a solution ideal for any business or organization that needs a way to manage essential documents or instructions. It works well for employee apps, educational apps, and even community apps—like police stations or fire departments.

Some common use cases for businesses, schools, and local emergency departments include:

As you can see, the plugin is extremely versatile and can be used to organize any set of guidelines or instructions segmented by categories, subcategories, and questionnaires.

Now that you have a basic understanding of the plugin’s features and use cases, we’ll walk you through implementing this plugin to your own app.

Here are the step by step instructions for you to follow for each tutorial below:

Once the plugin has been installed to your app from the marketplace, find it in the “My Features” section of your dashboard. By default, the “Content” tab should open automatically. If not, just navigate “Content” on the top of the screen, as I’ve highlighted above.

From there, simply click on the green “Add Category” button in the “Categories” section of the page.

This step is very self-explanatory. After you click the “Add” button in the previous step, you’ll be prompted to give your category a name. You need to name your category to continue.

For the purposes of this tutorial, I’m calling this category “Downtown Office.”

An image icon is also required. Simply click on the blank square to either upload your own image or browse from our stock image gallery.

The active status is also straightforward. By toggling a category as “Inactive,” it prevents the creation of new entities in the category. However, it doesn’t delete entities that have already been created.

Every category needs at least one subcategory. So technically, you can’t finish creating a category until you add a subcategory. This tutorial picks up from where we left off above.

Click the green “Add Subcategory” button at the bottom of the page.

Again, you can see the note in the screenshot explaining that each category must have a subcategory. Otherwise, the category won’t be displayed in the app.

Just like we did when we named the new category, the subcategory name is very straightforward. For this tutorial, I’m calling this subcategory as “Fire Instructions.”

Every subcategory needs to have a questionnaire. In order to proceed, you need to have the Free Text Questionnaire plugin added to your app from the marketplace.

The steps below pick up from where we left off in the previous tutorial.

The green “Add Questionnaire” button is located at the bottom of the subcategory page, on the screen where you named the subcategory.

Just click on the add button to continue.

The Document Manager doesn’t have a questionnaire’s built-in out of the box. So you need to connect it with a third-party solution to make this function properly.

As I mentioned earlier, the Free Text Questionnaire will be your best option. Click the “Add Feature” button, as shown below:

Once you click “Add Feature” in the previous step, a pop-up window will appear. There are three ways to find the Free Text Questionnaire:

I’ve highlighted all three of these below so you can see:

Regardless of how you find the plugin, just hit “Apply” in the bottom right corner of the screen to continue, after the plugin has been selected.

Technically, this is the final stage of creating a new category (our first tutorial).

Since each category requires a subcategory, and each subcategory requires a questionnaire, then your new category isn’t officially created until you click “Save” here.

You’ll use the Free Text Questionnaire separately to populate the documents for each category. Each time you create a new questionnaire, you’ll repeat this process by adding at least one questionnaire to every subcategory.

After seeing our clients use this plugin in real apps, we’ve learned some helpful tips and best practices along the way. Keep these in mind when you’re using the Document Manager for your own app.

As the name implies, the Document Manager plugin simply manages your content. It’s a way for you to organize things but doesn’t allow you to create instructions directly in the plugin.

Instead, you need to connect each subcategory to at least one questionnaire. So it’s helpful to have those done ahead of time.

In the tutorial above, I just linked it to a blank questionnaire as a sample. But when you’re building an app, it’s easier to have all of those done ahead of time. That way, you’re not constantly bouncing back and forth between two plugins.

Once you have all of your categories, subcategories, and questionnaires set up, you can share new updates with app users.

Just go to the entity, click on the three dots, and you’ll have the option to share it with specific people—such as your employees. You can do this from the end-user side of the app, not the admin side for building.

When you click on the share option, your phone’s share settings will automatically populate (text, email, etc.). This will encourage users to download the app to see the plans you’ve implemented.

Each entity can either be public or private. Private entities are only viewable by specific users who you’ve shared the content with (as described in pro tip #2 above).

If you set the entity to public, anyone with the app can search for it and start following that entity.

For those of you creating questionnaires with sensitive information, such as internal employee instructions, you’ll definitely want to take advantage of the privacy settings.