The CA Communities offers several types of content – enough so that –it can be overwhelming, at first. Refer to this post as a continuation of the cheat sheet we started with Right Type of Content: Discussions and Right Type of Content: Blogs . Now, we venture onward to documents! 
Document - a piece of written, printed, or electronic matter that provides information or evidence or that serves as an official record.
So, when are documents the best option for your post? Some good examples of documents within the communities include meeting notes, knowledge base articles, availability announcements, support documents, end of life announcement, presentations, team projects, how-to guides, and policy outlines. Documents rend to be used for more official documentation, as opposed to discussions which are considered more casual. Documents that are created right within the CA Communities site also have the added benefit of allowing for more collaborative updating and editing with ease. These types of documents, also known as “collaborative documents” function very much like wikis. In addition to creating collaborative documents, there is also the option to upload files if you already have the document stored locally. These documents are a bit less collaborative by nature, as, the editing process requires downloading, editing, and re-uploading the doc.
As per discussions, documents come in two varieties; collaborative documents you write straight within the community and uploaded files you load from your local machine. Both are used to convey official or factual information to the community.
To create a new collaborative document:
- Click Create > Document.
- Enter a title for your document.
- Enter content into the content field.
- Choose a community to post your document.
- Add relevant tags to your document making it searchable. You can choose from a list of popular tags or write your own.
- Should you want to control accessibility, you can control those settings from the “Advanced Options” menu at the bottom of the document create page. If you choose to not change any advanced options the defaults will be used. The available settings are:
- Restrict Authors - select if you wish to control the user(s) that can edit your document besides yourself. Default: all users with edit document rights can edit the document.
- Require Approval before Publication – this option allows you to choose user(s) to approve the document before it’s published. Choosing multiple people requires all to approve before publish. Default: no approval is needed.
- Restrict Comments – turns off the ability to comment on the document. Default: any user with ability to contribute to documents can comment.
7. Once you have selected your desired settings and added additional information such as tags, categories, and the appropriate community, you can either save your document as a draft and edit it later or publish the document.