One of the most powerful aspects of Jumpchart is that it allows you to share your Jumpcharts with the other people that are working on the project. From the client, to the designers, to the developers – everyone is on the same page, literally. After a recent chat with a user about sharing Jumpcharts we got to thinking about all the different ways that you can accomplish sharing in Jumpchart, a few of which you may not know about. So, without further ado, the 4 ways to share your Jumpchart:

1. Public Preview
The easiest and quickest way to share a Jumpchart is to turn on the public preview option. From any page in your jumpchart there is a menu option in the sidebar to see a preview. On the preview screen you will see a checkbox at the top of the page to turn on a public preview of your Jumpchart. When checked, this box will show a unique web address that you can give out to the people you’d like to share your Jumpchart with. Similarly, if you click on the “Sitemap view” option in the sidebar of each Jumpchart you will see a similar checkbox at the top of the page. Just like with previews; check it, and your site-map gets its own web address.

2. Adding a user
If you’ve got an extra unused user on your account you can add a new user to the project in question with either full permissions to make changes to the Jumpchart or you can mark their permissions as “view only” when inviting them. Most of the time we prefer to add users with full privileges because the more included people feel, the more likely they are to help out.

3. Export your Jumpchart
One of the more complicated, but customizable, ways to share your work would be to use Jumpchart’s export function to export your work out to XHTML/CSS and upload that to a web server. This is particularly useful when you’re nearing the end of your planning phase and you are ready to begin taking your content wireframe towards a graphic wireframe. A quick export and twenty minutes of css styling to change some details can go a long way towards showing a client a rough outline of what their finished site might look like. In fact, by hosting your exported Jumpcharts in a central location you can reference a single master stylesheet to personalize your Jumpcharts. For example, you could add your logo and branding from the master stylesheet and personalize the color-scheme of the exported Jumpchart to the clients colors using a simple @import in your master stylesheet to include a custom file for each clients exported Jumpchart.

4. Make a copy of the whole Jumpchart
When you create a new Jumpchart you are given the option of starting from scratch or copying another Jumpchart. By copying an existing Jumpchart and giving a new user full access privileges you can allow a client to change as much as they want and still maintain a clean master copy for your own use. This is really helpful when you’d like the client to add content, files and comments but would still like to keep your own copy for organization and internal commenting.

Sharing and collaborating on your website planning goes a long way towards paving the road to a smooth project. Clients that are included feel more of a sense of ownership in the project outcome and will work harder to ensure it’s a success. Designers and Developers benefit from a shorter and simpler planning cycle – always a nice thing. Jumpchart gives you lots of different options for sharing and collaborating on your website planning – so get to it and make your work easier.

Do you share your Jumpcharts in another way than these four? We’d love to know about it in the comments.