Requesting documentation from other people

Not all your evidence is yours to upload. A supplier holds the certificate, the lab holds the calibration records, a colleague in another department holds the signed procedure. A documentation request is a structured way to ask them for it: they get an email, they upload through a page of their own, and their files land in your project’s staged area for you to review. They never need a Regnora account, and they never see anything else in your workspace.

The shape of it: you write the ask once, address it to one or more people, and send. Each person gets their own way in and their own note. Everything that happens afterwards — who signed in, from where, what they sent, what you imported — is recorded on the request.

Creating a request

From a project’s Documentation area, open the Add menu and choose Request from someone. That takes you to Documentation requests, where Request documentation opens the form:

• Title — a short name. It becomes the subject line of the email.
• What do you need? — the ask itself, in markdown. Everyone you address reads this, so write it for someone with no access to your project.
• Who should we ask? — one or more email addresses, separated by commas or new lines. You can leave this empty and add people later.
• Upload to — the project folder their files land in. Leave it at Project root if there is no obvious home.
• Wanted by — an optional due date and time, 17:00 in your timezone unless you change it. The recipient’s page shows it in their own timezone; the email prints it in UTC.

Rather fill it in by describing it? Draft with the Assistant hands whatever you have typed so far to a new Assistant conversation, which drafts the request for you.

You can change the folder and the due date later from the request’s ⋯ menu (Edit folder and due date). The change applies to files uploaded from then on.

Creating a request makes a draft. Nothing is emailed yet, which means you can re-read and edit the ask before anyone sees it.

Manage: Documentation requests

Adding a note for one person

On the request page each recipient has a Note of their own — what you need from that person specifically, on top of the request’s description. “Certificate only, the audit report is coming from the lab” saves a round trip, and the note appears in their email and on their upload page. Nobody sees anybody else’s note.

This is usually the difference between one email that half-works for five people and five that each land properly.

Sending

Send emails everyone who has not been revoked. The dialog offers Email me a copy, which is on by default: one email to you listing who was asked and their notes. It never contains anyone’s sign-in link or code, so everything done on the upload page is recorded against the person who was asked. Replies always go to you whichever way you leave it, because Reply-To is your own address.

Once sent, the button becomes Re-send. Re-sending is also the fix for “I lost the email” and “the link stopped working” — it issues a fresh link and code and retires the old ones, so nobody is ever holding two live ways in.

You can edit a request after sending. Recipients read the live ask, so a clarification reaches them without another email.

What the recipient sees

Their email carries the ask, their note, and two ways in: a sign-in link, and a sign-in code printed beside their email address. Either one works on its own — the link if they can open it, the code (with that address) if they are reading on a phone and uploading from a laptop. The code stops working after 30 minutes and the link after seven days; the page can send them new ones at any time.

Signed in, they can add files — one at a time, or a whole folder at once — and remove files they added until you accept them. That is the whole surface. They cannot open, download or search anything — not your documents, not the other recipients’ files, not their own uploads once sent. The page says so, so nobody wastes time looking for a way to check what they submitted.

What happens to what they send

Uploaded files land in your project’s staged area, in the folder the request names if it names one. When the recipient sends a whole folder, its subfolders are recreated inside that folder, so the staged files propose the structure they sent. Staged means exactly what it means everywhere else in Regnora: the file is stored but not processed, not indexed, and not visible to agents or gap analyses. Nothing an outsider sends is used until someone on your side confirms it, from the same staged list an ordinary upload waits in — see Managing documents and evidence.

Each file records the request and the person it arrived through, so an imported document can always be traced back to the ask that produced it.

Following who has responded

Each recipient on the request page shows where they have got to:

• Not sent — added, but the request has not gone out yet.
• Sent — emailed, not yet opened.
• Opened — they have signed in.
• Files received — they have uploaded something.
• Revoked — their access has been withdrawn.

The History section is the full record: every change to the ask, every person added or revoked, every sendout, and — for the people outside your organisation — every sign-in, every failed sign-in attempt, every upload and deletion, with the address they used and where they connected from. This is the audit trail for evidence you did not produce yourself.

Withdrawing access

Revoke ends one person’s access immediately: their link, their code and any session they have open all stop working on their next click. It does not remove what they already sent — that is your project’s material now, and the history still records where it came from.

Close request does the same for everyone and stops further uploads. Closing is how you say “we have what we need”, and it is also how you shut a link that has been forwarded somewhere it should not have gone.

Asking an agent to do it

The Assistant can draft requests for you. Describe what you are missing and who has it — “I need ISO 13485 certificates from our three sterilisation suppliers” — and it will draft one request per stakeholder, each with its own description and note, for you to review in the Documentation requests list.

Sending always needs you. Right after drafting, the agent shows a card with a short summary and each request in full — what it asks for, who gets it and their notes, where uploads land and when they are wanted — and nothing leaves Regnora until you press Send them. Dismiss drops the sendout and the agent can revise and try again.

From a gap analysis, both the planner and the Plan stage have a Request documentation button that opens an Assistant conversation already pointed at that analysis, so the requests it drafts are linked back to the analysis that needed them. The Plan stage lists every request raised for the analysis, and each request links back to its analysis. See Running a gap analysis.

Tell the Assistant where the files should go and when you need them, and it sets the folder and due date on the drafts too. A day on its own means 17:00 in your timezone.

Request documentation is also a capability you can grant to a custom agent, so an agent of your own can do the same chasing inside its mandate. Two things to know about how it behaves there:

• The agent needs a project in scope, because a request names the project its uploads land in.
• Sending is only offered when there is someone to ask. In a chat the agent asks you to approve, exactly as the Assistant does. On a scheduled or triggered run there is nobody to approve, so the agent can draft the requests and leave them for you — it is never given the ability to email people unattended.

Limits

• The sign-in code expires 30 minutes after it is sent, and the link after seven days; Email me a new link and code on the upload page issues fresh ones.
• A signed-in session lasts an hour, after which the recipient signs in again.
• Five wrong codes in a row locks the code. The link in the same email still works, and so does a new email you send them.
• Recipients can upload the same file types as an ordinary upload.