An ongoing challenge for dealer management organizations is getting the right information to the right people within their dealer network to enhance sales, support and other activities. Information may include sensitive data such as pricing, sales performance reports, product specifications, design documents, product/service alerts, manuals and other documents. Opposing the desire to disseminate this information is the need to prevent access by unauthorized users. This problem is especially significant in dealer networks where users may change roles or employers; resulting in an increased risk of unauthorized information access.

Collaboration systems such as Microsoft SharePoint are ideal for disseminating documents, distributing product announcements, and providing discussion forums. When combined with the Epok Edition for Microsoft SharePoint, a business can provide dealers with documents, a knowledgebase and collaboration environment that is information rich, highly secure, and can be scaled to support globally distributed networks. Strong policy controls, audit logs and reporting tools enhance compliance systems.

With Epok software:

• Sales staff and dealer managers take on responsibility for user provisioning, which improves IT efficiency in managing the large number of extranet users enabling the information  to reach very large numbers of dealers and users.
• Proactive policy notification and acknowledgement ensures dealer users are aware of their obligations for information use when they access your site.
• Strong policy controls, rich audit logs and reporting tools enhance compliance reporting and monitoring systems.
• Access terms can be easily customized for individual dealers, or groups of dealers.
• Access rights are based on the terms of dealer agreements which ensure site access terminates automatically when the dealer agreement expires.
• Confidentiality, can be enforced at the site, document library and document level.  This allows dealer managers to control the access to sales associates, customers and third parties  to only the information they need and that they are entitled to see.
• Controls such as automatic access expiration, watermarks, policy acknowledgements, access logs and others within the SharePoint environment dramatically limit opportunities for inadvertent disclosure and other malfeasance.
• Dealer users can instantly view a dynamic list of all sites for which he or she has access authorization. 
• Each dealer can manage and maintain their own list of authorized users and groups for their sites, libraries and documents, which relieves IT departments from the cumbersome task of managing accounts for dealer extranet users.
• Users from geographically dispersed offices, that may use different authentication systems,  can single sign-on to SharePoint sites hosted in any office.