When SOAR was first developed, online storage services like OneDrive, SharePoint, DropBox or GoogleDrive were very much in its infancy. Today these services are hugely popular and some doctors prefer to store their appraisal (and other) documents online rather than having hard copies or even local copies on their computers.
We don't have any functions where documents stored externally can be linked or sync'ed directly to SOAR. However, as with most things, we do have a workaround.
Below we will highlight a general guide on how you can share your external documents with your Appraiser on SOAR; but a very important security point has to be addressed first:
Regardless of which online storage service you use, the uploaded files should be treated with the same strict data protection protocols as if on SOAR - i.e. do NOT upload anything that includes person/patient identifiable information.
OneDrive is just one example, if you use other online storage services, the same principles will apply:
It is important that you provide a description (or a bullet point list of the documents) for auditing purposes. Remember, you are only providing a link to your documents - the files themselves will remain on your OneDrive, no copies of it are transferred to SOAR.
For Revalidation, your Form 4s and submitted appraisal forms may be sampled by the Responsible Officer (RO) before a recommendation is made. The RO might not have access to your OneDrive (depending how you set up the sharing permissions), but a description of what was submitted might suffice.
NB - if the RO requests access to specific documents, it will be up to you to send these to them directly since it's not stored on SOAR.
Navigate to your OneDrive, select the folder you wish to share for your appraisal, and click on the "Share" button near top left of screen:
A popup window will open, giving options on how to share the folder:
Frm the above screenshot, click on the dropdown near the top which says "Anyone with the link can view and edit". This will expand to the screenshot below for you to deselect the option that lets others edit your files:
Un-check the box that says "Allow editing" and click Apply. This will change the previous dropdown menu to show "Anyone with the link can view":
You can now either enter the email address(es) of your Appraiser in the popup, or just click on the "Copy Link" button near bottom of the window to generate a unique shareable link:
Click on "Copy" when the link is generated, and paste this in the appropriate text/comments box in the corresponding Domain on SOAR.
When your appraisal forms have been completed and submitted, the Appraiser will see the link you have pasted and be able to navigate from that to your OneDrive. They will only be able to see and view the documents you have shared in the specified folder.
The only options your Appraiser will have is to either view the documents, or download and view offline at a later time.
Whilst the options and steps to set the sharing permissions will be slightly different, the principles are the same:
Please be advised that the SOAR Helpdesk will NOT have the capacity or the resource to help you with queries around individual external storage providers.
Just to reiterate the earlier point:
This page was last updated on: 11/05/2021
