Content Sharing
Reason helps different users of your organization coordinate and share information among their sites. One group can publish an item, and any other group can use that item on their site. If the creators of the item change it, that change instantly takes effect everywhere the item is used.
How does Sharing work?
Let's say the public relations group puts out a press release about a new scientific discovery made at the organization.
- When the public relations group posts the press release on their Reason site, they specify that the item is "shared." In other words, they want it to be available to other groups within the organization.
- The research group that made the discovery sees that the press release has been published and decides they would like to publish the article on their own site.
- The research group logs in to Reason and selects "Borrow: News/Post."
- They browse a listing of all posts from across the organization that are available to be placed on their site, and quickly find the post they are seeking (thanks to full-text searching and the ability to narrow their selection by contributing site).
- With a single click on the item, the research group places the post on their site. The post is integrated with any posts the research group has published, with a note that the item is provided courtesy of the public relations group.
- The public relations group notices that there is a typo in the press release and fixes it.
- The typo is instantly corrected on the research group's site (and any other sites that borrowed the item).
Sharing is available for almost every data type in Reason -- news posts, images, documents/assets, media, forms, events, and much more. In addition, due to the extensible nature of Reason's data structure, any custom data type you create can take advantage of this feature -- it's baked right into the Reason framework.
Sharing helps break down barriers
Most organizations suffer from "silo" effects: groups are not aware of each other's work and find it difficult to put in the extra effort needed to make their internal resources readily available to others.
Reason's sharing features help to break down those barriers by making it just as easy to make a resource available to other groups as it is to publish it on one's own site. Content maintainers are reassured that they retain control over the content that appears on their site -- and that they can keep an item private if needed.
Sharing also demonstrates to content providers that they are adding to a shared organization-wide resource when they contribute to their Reason site. So, rather than focusing on their isolated section of the web site, individuals are kept aware of the big picture.