What are resources, and who can see them?
Overview
Resources are how you hand people the documents and links they need without emailing them again every intake.
Two things confuse administrators here, and they are worth getting straight before you upload anything: a resource is not a file, and a folder does not hide anything. This article is for administrators.
1. What counts as a resource?
A resource is a titled container. Inside it you can put uploaded files, links, or a mix of both, and there is no limit of one item per resource.
That matters for how you structure things. A role's whole document pack, say a welcome letter, a policy PDF and a link to an external booking page, is better as one resource called "Welcome kit" than as three resources people have to find separately.
2. Folders organize your side, not theirs
Folders exist so administrators can find things in a long list. Moving a resource into a folder does not change who can see it.
A folder can be linked to one or more Sites. That scopes the folder to the administrators working at those sites, which is useful when several sites keep their own paperwork. It is still an admin-side control, and it says nothing about which of your people see the resources inside.
Who sees a resource is set on the resource itself, every time.
3. The two ways to limit a resource
Open visibility settings from the resource's card, or from the bulk actions bar when you have several selected. There is one switch and one set of conditions.
Admin only. Nobody outside your admin team sees it at all. Turning this on clears any conditions you had set, because once it is admin only they no longer mean anything. Turning it back off does not bring them back, so note what you had.
Conditions. Leave admin only off, and switch on as many of the six as you need.
4. What are the six conditions?
- Active in the database. Only people whose profile is currently active.
- Finished a sequence. Optionally narrowed to specific sequences, which is how you keep training materials away from people who have not started training.
- Assigned to an opportunity. Optionally narrowed to specific opportunities, so a role's paperwork reaches that role only.
- Age. An operator and an age, for example 18 and over.
- Linked to a site. Optionally narrowed to specific sites.
- Profile tags. Pick the tags, then choose whether a person needs any of them, all of them, or none of them.
That last option is worth noticing. Matching on none lets you hide something from a group rather than reveal it to one, which is often the shorter rule to write.
5. Conditions combine with AND
Switch on two and a person has to satisfy both, not either. Three conditions means all three.
This is the usual source of "why can nobody see this". Each condition you add makes the audience smaller, and it is easy to stack four reasonable-sounding rules that together describe almost nobody. The panel shows a plain-language summary of the rule as you build it, so read that line before you save.
6. What happens to someone whose age you do not know?
If you set an age rule, you also decide that. There are three answers:
- Hide it from them. The default, and the right one for anything genuinely age-restricted.
- Show it to them. Reasonable when the content is merely more relevant to one age group.
- Ignore the age rule for them. They are judged on your other conditions only.
Do not skip past this. If you collect date of birth inconsistently, the unknown group can be much larger than you assume, and this setting decides what happens to all of them.
7. Attention: setting visibility in bulk replaces what each resource had
Selecting several resources and opening visibility settings does something you might not expect. The panel opens blank rather than showing a merge of their current rules, and whatever you save is written over every selected resource.
So if you select ten resources to add one tag condition, you do not add it. You replace ten sets of rules with the one you just built, and the ones you did not look at are gone.
Bulk is the right tool when you want a group of resources to end up identical, which is common enough right after an import. When some of them already have rules worth keeping, change those one at a time.
8. What does inactive do?
A resource can be switched inactive. It leaves circulation without being deleted, and it keeps the visibility rules you configured.
That is what you want for anything seasonal. Switching a resource off in February and back on in June is much safer than deleting it and rebuilding its conditions from memory.
9. The same panel runs your recognition awards
Recognition awards use this exact panel, with the same six conditions and the same AND behaviour.
It is worth knowing because the thinking transfers. Once you have worked out how to describe "people who finished onboarding at the north site" for a resource, that is the same rule that decides who can earn an award.
Summary
- A resource is a container holding several files and links, not a single file.
- Folders do not hide anything. They organize administrators, and their site links scope which admins reach them.
- A new resource is visible to everyone. Restrict deliberately.
- Either admin only, or up to six conditions. Admin only clears the conditions.
- Conditions are active in the database, finished a sequence, assigned to an opportunity, age, linked to a site, and profile tags.
- Tags can match any, all or none, so you can hide from a group instead of revealing to one.
- Conditions combine with AND, so each one you add shrinks the audience.
- An age rule forces a decision about unknown dates of birth: hide, show, or ignore.
- Bulk visibility overwrites every selected resource with a rule built from blank.
- Inactive retires a resource without losing its rules.
- Recognition awards use the same conditions.