Cympha Cloud: One Workspace, Many Collaborators

Every clinic and every lab has the same file problem. Scans come in from a scanner. Designs come back from a designer. CBCT exports come from a third machine in a fourth folder. A specialist asks for "just that one file" you sent last week. The shared drive is full. Email refuses 30 MB attachments. WeTransfer links expired two days ago.

Cympha Cloud is the place those files live. Not "shared on top of a case" — a workspace of your own, with explicit, scoped, no-attachment-needed handoff to anyone you choose.

This cookbook walks through what's there today, with concrete pointers to where each thing lives in the app.

The workspace, in one place

Open My Cloud in the left sidebar. You see your workspace: a folder tree on the left, files in the centre, breadcrumbs at the top. The tree behaves the way you expect a tree to behave — but it is scoped to you, not to a drive letter the whole building can wander through.

Three sections stack down My Cloud:

My Cases — case-scoped files from the last 30 days, surfaced inside Cloud so you don't have to dig through individual case pages to find an attachment from three weeks ago.
The file browser — your own folder tree, with New folder and Upload above it.
My Shares — two columns, Shared by me and Shared with me.

During the 15-day Cympha LMS free trial, and on the free plan afterwards, the page carries its own banner: Free plan — files are kept for 7 days only. Long enough to share a scan with a colleague, short enough that nothing piles up unnoticed. A Cympha LMS subscription lifts that sweep and keeps your files indefinitely. Check which plan you are on before you treat Cloud as an archive.

Putting files in

The fastest way to get a file into Cloud depends on where it's coming from.

From your browser. In the cloud browser, click Upload, pick the file(s) from your machine, watch the progress toast. Standard click-to-select; works for any file type. Drag-and-drop into the browser tab is on the roadmap — today it's click-based.

From the desktop Agent. If you have Cympha Agent Manager installed, Cloud Monitor brings the work down to disk. Point it at one workspace folder and every case assigned to you arrives as workspace/category/PatientName_Date_caseID, with a freshly regenerated lab slip inside; it checks for new cases every 20 seconds.

Saving back is deliberately not a blind mirror, and this is the part worth reading twice. Drop a file into a case folder and the agent notices it — but it does not send it off unsupervised. It queues in the Cloud Monitor panel under New in workspace, where you click Upload on the row, or Upload all, once you have seen what is about to leave your machine. Exactly two things upload on their own: anything inside a dispatchable category folder, and any .zip or .gvw file, because those are self-contained design outputs. Deleting a file locally does not delete it in Cympha either — the agent reads a local delete as your decision and leaves the cloud copy alone.

From a case. Files attached to cases (scans the doctor sent, designs the lab returned) automatically surface in the My Cases view of Cloud — no separate upload step.

Sharing with a colleague

In the cloud browser, right-click any file or folder → Share. A dialog opens; type the recipient's email address.

Here's the part that matters: the share is identity-based. The recipient receives an email; if they don't have a Cympha account yet, they sign up. From that point on, the shared file appears in their Cloud workspace under a Shared with me section. They can open it, download it, and (for STL/PLY/GVW) review it in Studio.

Why identity-based instead of anonymous links: a real second opinion from a real colleague is the use case, not "blast this scan to a marketing list." Anonymous public links for one-off shows are on the roadmap — they'll come with view-only enforcement and an expiry date — but the default and only flow today is named recipients.

Sharing is revocable. In My Shares, under Shared by me, the share's Revoke share button ends the recipient's access immediately.

Every share also carries its own message thread, so the second opinion comes back attached to the file it is about instead of buried in a mail client — the Dialogue Dimension of a Living Case, applied to a single file. When the file belongs to a case, the case's own append-only event history is the record: 22 event types covering uploads, status moves, labels, comments and approvals, each written as a plain sentence rather than a raw log line.

There are no permission tiers to configure. A share means view and download, and that is the whole model — which is also why nobody can be handed write access to your workspace by accident.

Reviewing 3D files in your browser

Click a .stl, .ply, or .gvw (Cympha's design format) in the file browser, and the row menu offers View in 3D viewer. It opens the file in Cympha Studio — the browser-based dental viewer — using a short-lived presigned URL.

You don't need to download the file first. Studio renders it in a tab, you rotate it with the mouse, you check the geometry. If you shared the file with a colleague, they open it the same way: their Studio session pulls the file with its own presigned URL, scoped to their access.

This is the difference between "I emailed you an STL" and "I shared a file you can review without leaving the browser." No CAD seat on the recipient's machine. No "what software do you have." Studio is the universal review surface.

Bulk download as a ZIP

When you've shared a folder with someone — say, all the files for an aligner case — they don't need to download files one by one. In My Shares, a shared folder carries a Download as ZIP action that streams the whole folder as one archive from the server, with no client-side stitching. One click, one ZIP, the directory structure preserved inside.

Useful for handoff to off-platform collaborators (a printing service, a remote sub-lab, the radiologist who insists on a USB drive) or for offline archiving.

What's coming

In the spirit of being honest about what's already there versus what's planned:

Anonymous share links with view-only enforcement and configurable expiry (for client showcases, marketing, "show this to one person who refuses to sign up").
Storage quota tracking with per-plan limits surfaced in the UI; today the 7-day sweep is the only limit.
Trash + restore — soft-delete with a recovery window, instead of today's permanent delete.
In-app preview for image files and PDFs without leaving the cloud browser (Studio already covers 3D).

Each is a small layer on top of what's already shipped, not a rewrite.

Three handoffs Cympha Cloud removes from your day

Clinic to lab. Submit a case; the scans are in the case AND in your Cloud workspace's My Cases view. Want to send the lab a CBCT later? Share it from Cloud; it's attached. No email.
Lab to remote designer. Designer in another country, never visits your office. Cloud Monitor on their machine pulls the cases assigned to them into a local folder; they design, and when they save the finished design back into the case folder it uploads on its own, because design output is one of the two things the agent sends without asking. Anything else they drop there waits for them to click Upload.
Doctor to specialist. Surgical case, you want a periodontist's opinion on margins. Share the STL by email; specialist opens it in Studio from their phone or laptop, sends you their note. No CAD software on their side, no "did the WeTransfer link arrive."

That's what cloud file management means in a dental context: a workspace and a sharing model built for the handoffs this work actually contains. For the clinic, a scan reaches the specialist without a courier and without an expired link. For the lab, the finished design leaves the bench once and arrives where it was meant to go. And for both, there is the quiet part — knowing where a file is and who can see it — which is worth as much as the minutes it saves.

Cookbook #4 in our series. Open Cympha at app.cympha.com; preview 3D files in Cympha Studio. Next: a deep dive on the Cympha Agent Manager — the four small agents that turn your computer into a hands-off data-management layer.