Streamline Cloud Storage Sharing with Virtual Binders

Are you tired of the chaos that comes with sharing resources from online storage sites? With email, it’s easy to manage the sharing of individual files for a particular task, but when it comes to sharing multiple resources to multiple people, email quickly becomes an unmanageable place for everyone.

Since the pandemic, schools and workplaces have been seeing the benefits of maintaining resources in cloud-based repositories so that everyone can access files no matter where they are located. But sharing resources directly from these cloud repositories can quickly become chaotic and messy over time.

The pitfalls of sharing resources from online storage sites are many. When you’re working with filing systems, everyone has their own organization styles and preferences, which can be confusing and time-consuming for others. Also, when you give people access to a drive or folder for the purpose of sharing resources, you end up with a messy folder of reorganized files, nesting folders with strange naming conventions, copies of the original files with similar file names, and some additional files that you have no idea how they got in there in the first place.

So, what’s the solution? Virtual binders! Virtual binders offer a solution to your cloud storage sharing woes because you can visually organize your documents in tabs so that your stakeholders go directly to the document, instead of to a folder of files. Each document is represented by a tab and organized in such a way that it is intuitively easy for them to navigate through – just like a binder.

LiveBinders is the best choice for your digital binder solution for sharing cloud resources. The main benefit of using LiveBinders is you can keep the secure location of your file right where you need it. You can keep your files in their original location, and LiveBinders just needs the URL to add to a tab. You maintain control of your security. The key is that the presentation of your cloud files is much simpler and more intuitive to your stakeholders.

LiveBinders offers a host of other benefits, including customization, fixed structure for organizing tabs, collaboration, and more. You can label and color-code tabs to organize your information in a way that makes sense for your team. Unlike online folders, when you share a binder, you can’t mistakenly share the editing rights to your binders. Your viewers can only see the files they need to see, and they can’t mistakenly remove that file from your binder or add more to the binder than was intended. You can even invite team members to help you add and remove content in your binders.

Don’t wait to spend another year working in a messy environment. Take the first step towards streamlining your distribution of documents and resources with LiveBinders today!

Sign up to for a demo and learn more about how our platform can help you improve your productivity and collaboration.

Sign up for a Demo

Digital Binders and Marking Files as Private: A Customer’s Support Question Answered

Recently, one of our customers had a support question that we thought would be worth sharing with you.

Are you familiar with our “Mark File Private” feature? It’s a useful option available with a subscription plan that can help you restrict the views of any documents you upload in LiveBinders.

For those of you who are new to LiveBinders, LiveBinders offers a web application that lets you create digital binders. Digital binders are a way to organize and display online content in a Web browser, where each URL is represented by tabs similar to what you would see in a 3-ring binder. When we refer to ‘files’, we refer to desktop documents that are uploaded into a digital binder. Our digital binders can have certain access restrictions assigned to them like “private” and “public” but so can the files that are uploaded into the binders.

The support question we had was from a customer who was viewing her colleague’s LiveBinder, but was not able to see some of the content. In some tabs, the document would display, but in other tabs she saw a message shown below indicating that the file was private. 

When you upload a document to LiveBinders, we assign it it’s own unique URL.  Before you upload it, though, you have the option to click on the “Mark File Private” option. When selected, it will add a “private” tag to the URL in our system. The file’s URL will then have restrictions that prevent it from being viewed outside of the private binder it is added to. In other words, “private” files are only viewable in “private” binders.

So what happened? When our customer was viewing her colleagues binder, the binder was mistakenly set to “public” so any files that were marked as “private” did not display in the binder. Once her colleague made the binder private again, she was able to see all the documents in the binder, including those that were marked as “private.”

The general rule to remember is that if you mark a file as “private” you only have 1 option for making it visible to your audience, and that is to make sure the binder is set to “private” as well.

So why would you want to mark a document as “private”? 

It’s useful if you want to prevent anyone to view a document outside of the binder you are sharing it with. A person could copy the file’s link and paste it in an email, social media post or website page where it could then be viewed by an unwanted audience. The “private” tag keeps your uploaded content restricted to displaying only in the private binders that it was add to. Although every LiveBinder is automatically set to “private,” if a user mistakenly changes a binder to “public,” the “private” files stay protected.

If you want to learn more about this feature, feel free to contact us using our Contact Form and mention “Learn more about private files.”

We hope this information is helpful to you!

What is a Virtual Binder?

Going from 3-ring binders to virtual binders

Are you looking for a digital solution that will mirror your experience with paper and 3-ring binders? Searching online can return a variety of terms: Is it a virtual or digital binder you need? Do any of those terms describe a binder that can exist in the cloud such as an online binder?

A virtual binder is a paperless version of a binder.  And like the term “digital binder,” it doesn’t necessarily mean that the binder is online. It may just exist on your desktop computer and not be cloud-based.

But for many people looking for cloud-based solutions, a virtual or digital binder has to be easily updated and accessed in real time by others. With remote learning and remote work environments, “virtual” generally implies online as in “virtual office,” “virtual library,” and “virtual meetings.” These terms all describe a place that exists online to mimic the effects of a physical location. A virtual binder, then, can be a place you organize other online resources, similar to the way you’d organize paper in a physical binder.

If the solution you are looking for needs to be cloud-based, then the LiveBinders’ virtual, online binder platform might offer you the right solution for your sharing needs.

Virtual binders for your virtual library

For over 10 years, LiveBinders has been the virtual place for teachers to organize class exercises and reference materials; where administrators organize staff handbooks and board meeting notes; and where small businesses organize product catalogues, onboarding manuals, and training material. What makes our online binders their first choice is the intuitive navigation and the flexible framework for packaging media and links in the context of a physical 3-ring binder – but with so much more to offer because it is online.

Check out our Virtual binder page to learn more about how to get started.

Digital Binders Enabled Teachers to Stay Organized During Lockdown

There is something to be said about knowing your audience, but what about when your audience knows you?  Susie Tiggs could be called a LiveBinders’ Pro. When lock down started on March 13, 2020, Susie woke up the next morning and quickly put together a digital binder for her deaf and hard of hearing community, adding as many resources as she could gather for remote learning during COVID.  Her community instinctively knew she’d have something put together in a LiveBinder and were already Googling her name the next day.  In record time, her digital binder, Virtual Activities for Teachers and Families COVID-19, garnered thousands of views and at the time of the podcast was already at 40K.  LiveBinders quickly solved an issue for Susie and her teachers before it could even become a problem.  By already being familiar with her online binders, they could #pivot from in classroom to remote. Hear Susie’s fascinating turnaround story and how COVID has impacted the deaf and hard of hearing, blind and visually impaired in this short video clip from our podcast Success with the Texas Deaf and Hard of Hearing, Blind and Visually Impaired Student‪s‬.

Organize Success Podcast: Two College Instructors Share How They Use LiveBinders to Optimize Student Learning

Long before Covid19 transformed the landscape of classroom teaching, LiveBinders users John Dahlgren and Peggy Hohensee were figuring out how to better navigate their college institution’s learning management system (LMS) protocols. Both had one objective in mind: to make it easier for students to find their class materials. They discovered that LiveBinders could be a flexible central location for their course material both inside and outside their LMS. Inadvertently, they also realized that by having this consistent access to their resources, their students became more engaged and self-sufficient learners.

In this episode, Linda Houle joins our podcast again to welcome John and Peg. I hope that for those of you who are grappling with how to manage your classroom remotely, you’ll see how LiveBinders can be a valuable extension of your teaching practice.

LiveBinders Organize Success Podcast with John Dahlgren and Peggy Hohensee

John Dahlgren is a Career and Technical instructor of Drafting and CAD Technology courses and is a Technical Trainer with Butte College Contract Education. 

Peggy Hohensee is the Chair of the Purdue University Global Math Department responsible for a team of people who teach, develop curriculum, design and create supplemental course materials from freshman level mathematics to graduate statistics.

Click here to listen to the podcast on iTunes.

Click here to view the LiveBinders Podcast Binder with links to the binders and resources mentioned in the interview.