Creating and duplicating Shared Spaces

A Shared Space is like a virtual conference room where you can invite multiple stakeholders and have a running history of activity that occurs. This can be particularly useful during longer sales cycles. Keeping this in mind, when you create a Shared Space, you want to make it welcoming for participants. Get started by adding a description for participants to see and curate your content in a way that makes sense before you start inviting people.

This article will show you how to create a new Shared Space, as well as duplicate existing Shared Spaces. To save time and avoid reinventing the wheel each time you need a Shared Space, consider creating a template of your ideal Shared Space that you can duplicate and then customize for various customers, instead of starting from scratch each time.  

See how it works

Key features

• Create a new Shared Space
• Create a custom URL
• Allow external participants to invite others
• Allow external participants to upload their content
• Log your Shared Space to Salesforce
• Resize company logos and choose transparent backgrounds

You need this to succeed

• A Showpad account
• Showpad Plus or Ultimate package
• CRM activity logging for Shared Spaces is only available to customers on the Ultimate pricing package

The quick way to awesomeness

• Creating the Shared Space
• Activate optional logging to a CRM
• Duplicate an existing Shared Space to quickly create a new one with existing settings

Creating a new Shared Space

1. Open the Share tab, then navigate to Shared Spaces.
2. Click New Shared Space to begin building your space.
3. In the Shared Space title field, create a customer-facing name for this space. It will also be also helpful to differentiate it from others you may create later.
4. Customize the URL with the name you prefer. This URL cannot be changed anymore and will be visible when sharing your Shared Space.
5. Choose if participants can download content by toggling Allow Content Downloads on or off.
6. Choose if participants can invite others to the Shared Space by toggling Allow Invites on or off.
7. Choose if participants can upload their own documents by toggling Allow External Uploads.

   Note: Your Showpad Administrator manages this option.

8. Customers on our Ultimate package can choose to log the creation of the Shared Space to an account or opportunity in Salesforce, MS Dynamics, or C4C, if configured.
9. Select a Sharing theme if desired.
10. To set up default notification settings for internal users that join the Shared space, click Notification Settings. Toggle the options for Participant session summary, New joiner updates, and Comments. These will be the default settings for Showpad users, unless they change them on their own.
11. Click Done when ready. 
12. Once you have created your space, you can begin tailoring it to your intended audience. To add a short introduction or welcome note, hover over the description section and click the edit icon. Type the message you want participants to see when entering the space.
13. You can also upload the customer's logo to help customize it for your audience. Drag and drop the image into the logo field, or click Browse to select a file. The maximum size of the logo permitted is 5 MB. Once the file is uploaded, you can format the background to be transparent if your logo file is a .png. Click the three dot menu then select Format Background. Toggle on the option Use transparent background for PNGs. Keep this toggle off to maintain the image background.
14. To resize the photo you can drag the bottom right corner to your desired size. The header will adjust accordingly. The other aspects related to the look and feel of the shared space, such as your company logo, will be managed by your administrator. You can, however, resize your company logo by dragging the corner to your desired size.
15. When you want to see how your shared space looks to your invitees, you can quickly preview it from their perspective by clicking the Preview link in the blue banner. This will also be where you invite new participants, share a link, add content, and access your settings and insights at any time moving forward.

Note: To see how you can add content and invite people to your Shared Space, continue to Adding content to your Shared Space and Inviting people to Shared Spaces.

 Logging Shared Spaces activities to your CRM

1. Click your CRM button in the top banner to see the activities that were logged to objects in your CRM.
2. In this instance, Salesforce is the CRM with logging enabled. You will see if activities related to this Shared Space have been logged to a specific Account, Opportunity, Contact, or Lead in your CRM.
3. To log the current state of the Shared Space to your CRM, click Add Log, and select the Account or Opportunity and Contact or Lead. Click Log when you're done.
4. The log of your Shared Space will include general information like the title, description, creation date and participants, as well as a list of the included assets.
   Below is an example of how your Shared Space will log to your CRM, using Salesforce as the example.

Duplicate an existing Shared Space

Instead of creating a Shared Space from scratch for each set of customers, save time by duplicating an existing space. When you duplicate a Shared Space, the title, logo, description, content, and content descriptions will be copied into the new Shared Space. The participant invites and comments made in the original space will not be duplicated, and the activity timeline will be cleared. Consider creating a template of the ideal Shared Space for yourself and your customers, that can be easily duplicated and repurposed.

Note: When you duplicate a Shared Space, you cannot edit the custom URL. It will default to a random URL. 

1. Navigate to the Shared Spaces tab and locate the Share Space you wish to duplicate. You can use the search functionality to find what you're looking for. Toggle between list and gallery view by clicking the button to the left of New Shared Space. 
   
2. Click the three-dot menu icon and select Duplicate.  A message will populate informing you of what will be duplicated. Click Duplicate.
3. The title of the duplicated Shared Space will have the word Copy in front of the previous title. To edit the title of the Shared Space, open it and hover over the title. Click the pencil icon and add a new name for the Shared Space. This will help you differentiate the space and tailor it towards your customer.

Continue to the next article, where you learn how to add content to your Shared Space.