Document Repository

The Document Repository is an online file storage utility that can store files against pupil, staff or family profiles. This makes finding information easier.

Document Repository Location

To begin with, ADAM needs a location in which to save files on the actual server. A folder needs to be created on the server and configured in the site settings (see page ).

Please ensure that this folder is not a sub-folder of the web-root. If it is, then files can be accessed without necessarily following the correct permissions.

Pupil and Family Permissions

If you allow parent and pupil access to the Document Repository through the Parent and Pupil Portals, then you can control which categories they can see. Note that parents are not able to upload information into the repository or delete anything from it – only access information, and only from the categories that you give access to.

Allowing parents to upload documents to the document repository is handled separately to this and parents do not need specific permissions granted here in order to upload a document.

Even if you do give access to categories, parents still won’t get access to the Document Repository until they are given the permission to actually see the Document Repository in the portal.

To edit the permissions, click on the “Administration” tab, and under the “Document Repository” heading, click on “Edit family and pupil permissions”.

Note, carefully, the warning messages that ADAM shows for certain categories (such as the “Reports” category in the image above). Some categories are used internally by ADAM and can store temporary documents. In the case of reports, for example, each time a report is generated, a copy is stored in the archive. This copy is continually updated until the report is published. If you allow parent access to this category, they will be able to see draft copies of the reports before the reports are published.

Click on the “change” option to adjust the permissions for that group:

When done, click on the Save privileges button.

Note that if you change the permissions for a restricted group, ADAM will show the following warning:

Unlike the staff permissions, we now are simply controlling whether the groups can be seen by families or pupils. Parents and pupils can only ever get read-only access from this screen.

Parent Uploads into the Document Repository

ADAM can allow parents, and potentially pupils, to upload documents to ADAM for potential inclusion into the Document Repository. All files that are uploaded by parents or pupils are not directly loaded into the document repository and must first be approved by either the site administrator or a staff member with appropriate permissions to do so before the document is available.

Creating Upload Spaces

ADAM allows you to create a number of different upload spaces and, within each of these, specify a number of files, with descriptions, for parents to upload. All uploads are optional and cannot be forced.

Navigate to Administration → Document Repository → Manage parent and pupil uploads to the document repository.

Click on “add a new upload” to begin. Consider the example here where a file upload slot is being created to gather documents for a “Sports Tour to Zimbabwe”. You might want to create an upload space for “Admissions Documents”. Note that we are not specifying yet which documents need to be uploaded. This comes next.

Please take note: The “audience” allows us to focus these upload forms to families or pupils who are either applicants to the school or are current pupils.

The audience selects who an upload is shown to, based on a person’s admissions status: Applicant uploads are shown to applicants, and Current uploads to current pupils and families.

Applicant uploads do double duty. They are presented to parents as a step within the online application itself; documents uploaded there are staged against the application and filed automatically into the document repository when it is approved, without passing through the approval step described below. The same upload definitions are also shown in the portal to anyone already in the database whose status is still at the applicant stage — for example, an applicant who has been approved but not yet enrolled — and documents that they upload through the portal do go through that approval step. Likewise, Current uploads are shown in the portal to current pupils and families.

In other words, only documents collected during an online application are filed automatically when the application is approved. Everything uploaded through the portal — whatever the audience — must be approved by a staff member before it appears in the document repository.

Note also, that the audience choice (pupils vs families) will dictate which of the document repository categories you can choose from. Choosing a “Family” audience and a “Pupil” category will result in the documents being uploaded to the “Unfiled” category in the “Family” section of the document repository. The same is true if a “Pupil” audience is selected, but a family category is chosen.

The people listed under the Notify option will be notified when new documents have been uploaded to ADAM for approval. Documents will not appear in the document repository until they have been approved by a staff member with the permission to approve them.

Warning

If no staff members are listed under the Notify option, then all staff who have permissions to approve documents will be notified. Depending on your permission setup, this could be many staff members.

You can add more upload slots by clicking on the “add a new file” at the bottom. You can remove existing slots by clicking on the “bin” next to the row.

The “Max Size” column specifies how large the file may be in megabytes. The size here may vary depending on what sort of documents you are asking parents to upload.

The Requirement column lets you choose how strongly each document is enforced. This only has an effect for uploads whose audience is set to Applicant, where the choice controls what happens when those documents are collected during the online application. There are three options:

Optional — nothing is shown to the applicant about this document, and it is never enforced.
Requested — the applicant sees a Requested badge next to the document, and is warned if they try to move on without uploading it. They can still submit the application without it.
Mandatory — the applicant sees a red Required badge, and cannot submit the application until the document has been uploaded. The final review step withholds the submit button and lists what is still missing, and ADAM also refuses the submission on the server if it is somehow bypassed.

None of this affects an upload anywhere outside the online application — uploads made through the Parent and Pupil Portal are never blocked by the Requirement setting.

Warning

If your school upgraded from an earlier version of ADAM, every slot that was previously marked “Required” has been carried forward as Requested, not Mandatory. Nothing about how applications are enforced has changed on its own — if you want ADAM to actually stop an application being submitted without a document, you need to open the upload and change the relevant slot to Mandatory yourself.

Note

Setting a slot to Mandatory means an application that is missing that document simply cannot be submitted — it stays incomplete rather than arriving at your school in an incomplete state. Incomplete applications are covered by the reminder emails already sent to parents, but if they are never completed, they will eventually expire and be removed. If you mark a lot of slots as Mandatory, expect more applications to expire unsubmitted and fewer to reach you. That may well be the outcome you want — just make the choice deliberately, rather than by marking everything Mandatory without thinking through the trade-off.

The Accepted Types column controls which kinds of file a parent or applicant may upload into that slot. Tick one or more of the file types on offer — PDF document, JPEG image, PNG image, GIF image, Word document, Excel spreadsheet, CSV file and Plain text. A parent is only able to upload a file whose type you have ticked here, and the accepted types are shown to them alongside the slot (see Instructions for Parents below). Each slot must have at least one type ticked. If you leave a slot with nothing ticked, ADAM will refuse to save the whole upload and ask you to choose at least one accepted file type for that slot.

Once you are done, click on the Save File Upload button.

Look carefully at the example above. Within the one file upload section, we are asking for three documents. This allows parents to see the different upload sections and easily differentiate between them. These details, with some others already existing on the system, may look like this on the parent portal:

Instructions for Parents

Depending on the permissions assigned to the parents and pupils, the options to upload documents will appear as follows in the portal:

ADAM will list the documents that can be uploaded:

Beneath each document, ADAM shows the file types that may be uploaded into that slot — for example Accepted: PDF document, JPEG image. These are the accepted types you ticked when creating the upload space. Where a slot has not had any file types configured, ADAM shows Accepted: no file types configured instead, and nothing can be uploaded until you tick at least one type.

Parents should click on the Choose file button and select the file they wish to upload. They may choose one or more files. Once they have selected all the files they wish to upload, they should click on the Upload documents button below the files they have chosen.

If a parent chooses a file whose type is not accepted for that slot, ADAM rejects it and shows a message naming the accepted types — for example That file type is not accepted. Accepted types: PDF document, JPEG image.

Note that if they choose a file that is larger than the maximum size allowed, they will receive the following error message:

Once they click on Okay, the offending file is shown in red and the button at the bottom is disabled until they correct the issue:

To clear the file, click on Choose file and then either choose another file or click on the Cancel button in the file selection window to clear the file:

Approving Documents

ADAM will notify the selected staff member when new documents have been uploaded to ADAM and which require approval.

To begin the approval process, navigate to Administration → Document Repository → Approve parent and pupil uploads.

You may be asked to choose a particular section, particularly if there have been files from multiple sections being uploaded.

Click on a File Name to download it and view it.

Once you have made a decision, you can then click on the reject or accept option next to the file. If you accept it, the document will automatically appear in the appropriate category within the document repository.

If you choose to reject the upload, be aware that it will be deleted with no way of recovering it.

Warning

Note that ADAM makes no attempt to scan any uploaded files for viruses and provides no warranty that the uploaded files will be safe to open. Please ensure that staff who are responsible for approving document uploads are well-versed in the appropriate computer security protocols to follow, and that their computers are equipped with up-to-date antivirus scanners.

Staff Permissions

You can customise the access to the Document Repository based on the staff security groups.

To edit the permissions, click on the “Administration” tab, and under the “Document Repository” heading, click on “Edit staff permissions”.

The different groups are listed and, next to them, are the current permissions that have been assigned to them. The Staff Groups are shown with one or more of three letters shown:

R – the group has permission to read and view the files.
A – the group has permission to add files to that category.
D – the group has permission to delete files from that category.

Next to each category is a “change” option. Click on this option to change the permissions for that group.

Next to each option, click on “Read”, “Add” or “Delete” to assign that group the associated permissions.

Click on the “Save privileges” button at the bottom to save these changes. The permission category table should now reflect these new permissions.

File Types Staff May Upload

A site setting controls which file types staff are allowed to upload into the document repository. Navigate to Administration → Site Administration → Edit site settings, open the Documents category and find the Document Repository Staff Allowed Filetypes setting in the Storage section. It holds a comma-separated list of file extensions (by default pdf,jpg,jpeg,png,gif,doc,docx,xls,xlsx,csv,txt) that staff may upload.

If you upload one or more documents whose type is not on this list, ADAM skips those files and shows a warning that names them and lists the accepted types, so that nothing disappears without explanation — for example These files were not uploaded because their type is not allowed: notes.key. Accepted types: PDF document, JPEG image, …

This staff allow-list is separate from the per-slot accepted types you set for parent and applicant uploads (see Creating Upload Spaces). The Document Repository Banned Filetypes setting alongside it always applies as a final backstop, regardless of what is allowed.

Uploading Documents in Bulk

Pupil and staff documents can be uploaded in bulk to the document repository.

Naming of Documents

In order to be uploaded in bulk, the documents must be named so that ADAM can match them to the pupils or staff members. Documents can be named in any of four ways:

First-Name Last-Name: e.g. John Smith.pdf
Last-Name First-Name: e.g. Smith John.pdf
AdminNumber: e.g. AB01234.pdf
Username: e.g. 53johns.pdf

The document names are not case sensitive and so a document named john smith.pdf would be matched to John Smith.

You can also mix methods in a single upload. So ADAM will check all possible versions of each file to match it.

Uploading the Documents

Navigate to Pupils → Document Repository → Upload documents in bulk or to Staff → Document Repository → Upload documents in bulk. Both options take you to the same screen with the same set of options.

Take special note of the limitations with regards to uploading files. These are server specific and so yours may well be different to the limits shown in the diagram above.

Choose the appropriate document repository category to upload the documents into. It is important that you choose an appropriate category for the document uploads. If you choose a pupil category, only pupil names will be checked when trying to match documents. Similarly, if you choose a staff category, only staff names will be checked.
Add in a description for the documents. This description is important because all your documents are currently named to identify which pupil they belong to and so it will not be apparent what their content is.
Finally, use the Choose Documents button to select the files that you wish to upload. You can select multiple files, subject to the limits set on your server.

Once you have provided the information, please click on the Upload Documents button to begin the document upload process.

ADAM then shows a Bulk Upload Results page summarising what happened. A short summary line at the top counts the outcomes (for example 8 uploaded, 1 no match, 1 multiple matches.), followed by a table with a row for each file you uploaded:

File — the name of the file you uploaded.
Matched person — the pupil or staff member the file was matched to. For pupils, the current grade is shown in brackets to help you confirm the right match. A dash (—) appears where nothing was matched.
Status — the outcome for that file: Uploaded, No match, Multiple matches or Upload failed.

An Upload more documents link appears above and below the table so that you can start another upload straight away.

Note

This results page can only be viewed once, immediately after the upload. If you navigate away and try to return to it, ADAM shows the message These results are no longer available. Please upload your documents again. — you would need to upload the documents again to see a fresh report.

Troubleshooting Failed Matches

Sometimes ADAM fails to match documents. This can happen for a number of reasons. Most commonly are:

You chose the wrong category. If you are uploading staff documents, you must choose a staff category, and if you are uploading pupil documents, you must choose a pupil category. ADAM will specifically look at the category to decide which people to check the documents against.
The document name has a spelling mistake.
The document uses a nickname or other variation of the name. ADAM uses the first name field to match documents against.
There is more than one person with the same name. If ADAM finds two (or more) possible matches for a document, it will not be uploaded to either. In this case you will need to either rename the document using an Admin number or username. Alternatively, you may have to upload these documents manually.
The pupil is not a currently registered pupil or the staff member is not an active member of staff. ADAM won’t allow bulk uploading for people who are not currently enrolled or engaged in the school.

Removing Documents

Documents can either be removed individually or in bulk. To remove an individual document, navigate to the Document Repository of the person concerned and click on the delete option next to the file that you would like removed:

Removing Documents in Bulk

To remove many documents at once, ADAM provides a tool to do this. Navigate to Administration → Document Repository → Delete documents from the Document Repository.

Choose the category to delete documents from (in the example above, we are deleting documents from the “Email Attachments” category - a category that ADAM uses to store files that are sent via the Messaging Centre).

Choose a “Start” and “End” time - only documents that were uploaded or created during this time window will be deleted.

Click on the Next button to continue.

ADAM will now create a ZIP backup of these files which you can download for backup purposes.

Warning

Note that if you do not download this ZIP file and continue with the deletion, you will not be able to access these files since ADAM will delete them permanently from its storage.

ADAM will also show a list of the files that will be deleted. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on Delete these files permanently…

Warning

If ADAM is unable to generate the ZIP backup - perhaps because there are too many files or the files are too big - then you will need to select a smaller date range to delete.

Once the files are deleted, ADAM will confirm the number of files that were removed.

Deleting Unlinked Files

ADAM links every file in the document repository to either a pupil, a family or a staff member. Occasionally, if one of these data entries is deleted, it can result in there being “orphaned” files in the Document Repository. Navigate to Administration → Document Repository → Delete unlinked documents for the Document Repository.

ADAM will show you a list of these documents and invite you to download a ZIP copy of them for backup purposes. If you do not download them here, ADAM will delete them permanently and they will not be recoverable.

Click on the Remove these files to delete them.

Site Document Repository

Some files are needed for sharing across the site. These can include graphics that are used for reporting templates. To upload a document to the Site Repository, navigate to Administration → Document Repository → View the Site Document Repository.

The category is important here:

The Site category is not used, currently, and will only act as a store for site-related information. You are encouraged not to use this category.
The Certificates category is used for PDF certificate templates for electronically generated certificates. Note that these PDFs must be saved in PDF Version 1.5 or earlier for ADAM to understand them.
The Logos category is used for specifying logos that ADAM should use for display and printing. It also can store email banners and imagery. For more information about school logos, please see the specific documentation.
The Reporting category is used for miscellaneous files that ADAM might need for report templates. Note that this may include logos, but those will probably catered for in the Logos category above. You will be given specific instructions regarding your report templates.

Document Repository