Product Updates · 6 min read
Documents become first-class citizens of your processes
With release 0.86.x, the documents behind your processes — contracts, appraisals, orders — become part of the workflow itself: uploads from the form, versioning, inherited permissions, and deletion that is never instant.
The problem with disconnected documents
In almost every business process there is one document that matters more than anything else: the contract to sign, the appraisal to approve, the order to fulfill. Yet in most workflow tools that document is treated as an afterthought — a link to a shared folder, pasted into a text field, that eventually stops working.
Anyone who has moved or renamed a shared folder knows what happens next: the link in the process points to nothing, nobody can say for certain which version is the latest, and finding out who viewed or changed the file means leaving the workflow and relying on people's memory. The document lives elsewhere, and the process simply ignores it.
The Document field, inside the process
With release 0.86.x, FlowSharp introduces a new field type in the Data Schema: Document. It is configured like any other field — single or multiple, with allowed formats and a maximum file size — and behaves like a natural part of the process, not an external add-on.
Uploads happen directly from the form, with a progress bar and validation before the file is even sent. Once uploaded, the document is accessible to anyone with access to the item: instant download, and in-browser preview for PDFs, images, and text files, with no need to download anything just to take a look.
Every document carries its own name, version, and history. At configuration time you choose whether a replacement keeps previous versions — the 'versioned' policy — or overwrites them — the 'replace' policy — depending on whether the process needs full historical traceability or just the latest valid version.
Deleting is never an instant act
Business documents often carry legal or contractual weight, which is why deletion is governed with the same seriousness as the rest of the process. Only an administrator can delete a document, and even then nothing irreversible happens right away: a 30-day grace period kicks in, configurable, during which restoration is still possible. Only once it expires are the bytes actually destroyed.
The same cautious approach applies to storage space: every tenant has its own storage quota, with a warning at 80% usage and a block on new uploads only once it hits 100%. Downloads and deletions remain always possible, because running low on space should never bring an ongoing process to a halt.
Under the hood: where the bytes live, who decides who sees what
The actual files are stored on S3-compatible object storage: the choice of provider belongs to whoever installs FlowSharp and is never exposed to the people working in the processes. Uploads and downloads always go through the FlowSharp domain, so users never need to know where the data physically lives. Access credentials are encrypted, and no temporary URL is ever saved in the data, where it could expire or be copied elsewhere.
Who sees what is always decided by FlowSharp: permissions, identity, and document lifecycle are governed by the workflow engine, not by the underlying storage. Every night, an automatic reconciliation compares storage against the internal catalog, catching any mismatch before it becomes a visible problem.
Built to withstand, not just to work
Before being switched on in production, the entire document subsystem went through an independent adversarial security review: a systematic attempt to break it, not just to check that it worked in the expected cases. Every issue found was closed with a dedicated test, including the subtlest edge cases — like two people deleting and restoring the same document almost simultaneously, or space counts that could double due to a synchronization glitch.
This is the kind of attention that normally stays invisible to everyday users, but it's the difference between a document store that seems to work and one you can actually rely on when a contract or an appraisal is on the line.
Where to find it, right away
A new 'Documents' section has appeared in Settings, showing space used, quotas, and the configured provider, while Diagnostics now lets you check storage health in real time. Provisioning a new bucket takes a single click, with no need to leave FlowSharp to configure anything elsewhere.
The feature is available right away in all installations updated to 0.86.x. For configuration details — allowed formats, versioning policies, quota management — the 'Documents' chapter of the in-app guide is the recommended starting point.