Introduction
Q&A is an integral part of a Virtual Data Room (VDR). It helps you manage, track, and distribute questions and answers between the people in your project.
By the end of this course you'll be able to:
- Understand how Q&A is used for a variety of use-cases
- Set up Q&A for your project
- Distinguish between Q&A settings for different project types
- Track the flow of questions and answers in your project
- Track the flow of questions and answers in your project
- Understand the different roles for both the question and answer sides
How Q&A works with your project
Q&A is a module within your VDR project that - when enabled - allows the users of your project to ask questions and receive answers in an organized way.
A project’s administrator may set up Q&A to behave differently, depending on the project’s use-case. Here are some Q&A settings that change its behaviour:
- In the case of a bidding process, should questions be submitted anonymously to maintain fairness?
- Should all answers pass through a legal team before being answered?
- Is there a deadline for asking questions? Do you require a report showing that no questions were asked after the deadline?
Download this guide showing Q&A states, roles, and flows.
Before You Begin - Things To Consider
Have you set up your Groups & Users in the dataroom?
In order to use Q&A, a user must first have access to your project. In other words, a user must be added to a group in your project before being added to Q&A.
Will there be a team member who needs to review questions or answers before they are submitted?
Both the question and answer groups can have an optional “gatekeeper”, or "approver". The gatekeeper controls the flow of questions and answers.
If a gatekeeper role is present on the question side, then all questions must pass through the gatekeeper.
Similarly, if the gatekeeper role is present on the answer side, then all answers must pass through the gatekeeper first before being handed back to the question group.
On the question side, the gatekeeper is known as a “Question Coordinator”.
On the answer side, the gatekeepers are known as “Answer Coordinators” or "Approvers".