Online Deal Room

One valuable usage of collaboration technology is to create an online deal room for facilitating transactions. These include M&A, spinouts, and bankruptcy proceedings. Historically, however, these deal rooms were costly and difficult to set up. A typical online deal room might take at least a day or two to set up, and cost more than $10,000.

With the evolution of collaboration technology, however, you can now accelerate transactions with an online deal room you can set up in minutes, without any help from IT. The key is to find a general-purpose collaboration vendor that can still deliver the security and auditability of a traditional online deal room.

Enterprise-grade Security

Given the value of transactions and the sensitivity of confidential information, you need your online deal room vendor to provide the highest level of security. Saving hundreds of thousands of dollars on online deal rooms would be penny-wise and pound-foolish if it resulted in a multi-million dollar leak. Find a deal room vendor that caters to your specific needs.

For example, PBworks Legal Hub is a specialized version of the broader PBworks hosted collaboration product with extra security specifically for legal use cases. This special edition gives your online deal room the same level of security that the NSA has approved for "Top Secret" documents. All the information in your online deal room is always encrypted, except when it appears in the web browser of an authorized user. And you can configure the access controls to make sure you're disclosing just the right amount of information.

Complete Audit Log

Even with the best security in the world, you need to worry about the potential dangers of human-induced security leaks. What happens if a user writes their password on a Post-It note and loses that note? Make sure your online deal room includes an audit log to help you find suspicious usage. For example, PBworks records every action by every user, and allows you to filter by any criteria so that you can see each person that has downloaded a document, or view the complete activity history for any individual user. This permanent record makes your online deal room a forensic record of who saw what and when.

Complete Searchability

Make your online deal room even more useful with a powerful search engine. If your online deal room contains all the relevant documents and data, a comprehensive search function can save hours of manual review, and accelerate the closing of the transaction. Legal Hub, for example, allows you to search within the full text of all documents you have uploaded to your online deal room to find that needle in a haystack. This applies to all Microsoft Office documents, as well as WordPerfect, PDF, and text files.