05. Groups - Activity

The second area of the application shows activity based around "user-groups". Within a typical Virtual Data Room, users are bundled together into Groups. People who administer a data room are known usually as the 'seller' or 'sell-side'. They like to get activity information at the group level as invariably these groups are working as a team in potentially buying the asset being sold. The different teams working in possibly purchasing the asset are collectively known as the 'buy-side'. This 'buy-side' activity information tells the 'sell-side' who are the credible buyers doing the due-diligence.

This first area is pretty self explanatory and is one of the main things the sell-side want to know. How many documents certain groups have read is a good indication of their level of their interest. If you have worked in the industry you will know that people play games and this type of activity can be doctored by trawling through a room and opening and closing all documents. It happens. Therefore a blended approach is taken. There is nothing set in stone.

most Virtual Data Rooms are 'locked down' in the sense that documents cannot be printed. However it is not unusual for this to change in the latter stages of the transaction. This is because the sell-side can decide to whittle-down (do people still say that these days - I don't know) the bidders (the teams of buyers) down to 1 or 2. In this case a greater degree of trust usually exists and they can then decide to open up more documents for access and also reduce some of the protective measures around them. In this case letting people print them.

A metric that pops from time to time with the VDR providers is knowing how long people have been reading documents within the data room. Of course I know and you know this is somewhat flawed however its accepted in the industry as being reasonably credible so therefore one would expect to see reports for it. This is just an example of that. If the data can come out of the VDR report engine then it can be easily rendered.

Again - pretty straightforward really. This shows all time logins by group. This is quite useful at the beginning of a transaction (the first day or two) as it shows people have received their invites and managed to log-on successfully. These first few days can be quite frenetic and therefore getting people on the system is key. There are reasons why this can go wrong for groups but that is beyond the scope of this post, and this blog come to that.

This is a useful view as its essentially giving a favourites list of each group. The view is searchable which works in a filter sense. In other words if I search for a keyword unique to a document title, then I will have a list of that document as its been read by each group. I can easily compare each groups level of interest with that document.

This is a dashboard type of view giving a textural list of the previous charts. In other words, the numbers in here are the same as the numbers used in the previous graphs. The difference here is that everything is listed in the same screen.