We are very pleased to announce a major new feature: the ability to share your bill sheets. When you go to any of your bill sheets, you’ll see a new tab for sharing.
Sharing a bill sheet is a lot like sharing a stakeholder page. You invite a user to share your bill sheet by entering their email address on the share tab. If you want the new user to be able to add comments to your bill sheet, check the “edit custom columns” box. The new user will get an email invitation letting them know they have access to your bill sheet, along with a link to the bill sheet and some advice for how to use it. The email is automatically generated as soon as you click add user.
The new user will be able to see your bill sheet, and filter, sort, export it just like it was their own. They can even create widgets from shared bill sheets. One of the most useful features of sharing is that you can combine your own bill sheets with any shared bill sheets you have access to. The added user cannot change settings, change the query, or hide or unhide bills from the bill sheet, but they can add comments (if you gave them permission to).
Shared Bill Sheets and Stakeholder Pages have a lot in common, but there are important differences. Sharing bill sheets is intended for coworkers or other collaborators to share the task of curating a list of bills, and to be able to combine bill sheets between accounts for convenient company wide reporting. You can’t hide columns from people you have shared you bill sheet with, so all your comments are available for review and, depending on your settings, editing by those you’ve shared with.
Stakeholder Pages are intended for sharing with a group of others. You can decide which columns you’d like to show, so you can keep some of your comments private and share just the comments you want others to see. You can also chose who you want to be able to view the sheet user by user (like sharing a bill sheet), or set your Stakeholder Page to public to share with everyone (which is not an option when sharing bill sheets). The information on a Stakeholder Page are for reading only; the stakeholders can’t edit the grid, guaranteeing your comments stay as you made them. If you want to get the thoughts of your stakeholders, you can turn on the discussion thread feature.
These suggestions for how to use Shared Bill Sheets and Stakeholder Pages are based on how users are using them now, and on the customer requests that drove the development of these features. You are, of course, free to use them however suits you best.
About BillTrack50 – BillTrack50 is a user friendly free service that provides legislation research in all 50 states and federally. BillTrack50 also offers legislation and regulation tracking across the nation with tools to help organization stay on top of changes (bill sheets and alerts) and share legislation they are tracking with key stakeholders (legislator scorecards, widgets and stakeholder pages). If you are interested in learning more about how BillTrack50 saves organizations time and money, sign up for a demo and try it out BillTrack50 Pro for a month, for free.