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7 reasons organisations are ditching email for Progress ShareFile in 2026

6 mins read | Published on 25 February 2026
Blog

Email is brilliant right up until it becomes your process.

If you work with regulated organisations like the government, legal, finance, healthcare and education sector that handle a lot of paperwork, you’ll know the pattern. A “quick” client request turns into 30-message threads, a mix of attachments and links, someone forwards something they shouldn’t, and then everyone spends the next hour asking, “Which version is the latest?”

That mess is not just annoying, it’s expensive. It slows down onboarding, makes audits painful, and quietly increases risk in a world where GDPR expectations are not getting any easier.

The good news is you can now bring a cleaner answer to those conversations!

Progress ShareFile is now available exclusively through Infinigate UK&I, giving you a secure way to help customers send, receive, sign, and manage documents with proper controls and a client experience that feels intentional.

How we can help you take ShareFile to market:


By partnering with us, you’re not just accessing the solution, you’re gaining a growth partner to help you scope, position and deliver it successfully:

  • Dedicated Vendor Manager – support with positioning, commercial guidance, deal shaping and roadmap alignment
  • Inside Sales Support – help identifying opportunities, building pipelines, and accelerating next steps
  • Technical support – practical assistance across configuration, integration and troubleshooting
  • Pre- & post-sales support – from solution design and validation through to onboarding and adoption
  • Marketing support – campaign-in-a-box assets, messaging support and partner enablement to spark demand

7 practical reasons regulated firms are moving away from email-led document workflows

1) “Email as a workflow” breaks the moment you need an audit trail

Email tells you who sent something, and when. It does not reliably tell you who accessed it, what they did with it, whether they downloaded it, or whether it was shared onwards.

In regulated environments, that gap matters. When a customer needs to demonstrate control over sensitive data, they need something more structured than a mailbox and best intentions.

Progress ShareFile is designed to support regulated use cases with controls and tracking that help teams build a clearer record of activity, not just a trail of messages. [Progress ShareFile datasheet, © 2025 Progress]

2) Businesses hate jumping through hoops, but they still expect security

Most client-facing “secure processes” fail for one simple reason, the client cannot or will not use them.

ShareFile’s approach is built around making secure external collaboration easier for non-technical users, including customisable, branded client portals for exchanging documents and tracking tasks. That’s a big deal for professional services firms where the customer experience is part of the value. [Progress ShareFile datasheet, © 2025 Progress]

When you can offer a client portal that looks and feels like the firm’s own service, you’re not only improving security, you’re improving trust.

3) Version control is a hidden productivity killer

Everyone has lived the pain:

  • “Final.docx”
  • “Final final.docx”
  • “Final final approved v2.docx”

Now add third parties, time pressure, and compliance requirements.

ShareFile is designed for document-heavy industries that need to collaborate externally while keeping control and visibility. This is where secure file sharing stops being a “nice-to-have” and becomes part of delivering the service on time. [Progress ShareFile datasheet, © 2025 Progress]

4) Onboarding by email is slow, inconsistent, and hard to scale

Manual onboarding tends to look like this:

  1. Ask for documents
  2. Chase documents
  3. Discover missing documents
  4. Chase again
  5. Repeat, with a different approach every time

That inconsistency is exactly what operations teams want to remove.

ShareFile supports document request lists, forms, and workflow automation, so customers can standardise intake, reduce back-and-forth, and cut turnaround time. That’s not just “efficiency”, it’s a better service experience that scales without constantly adding admin time.

5) E-signature should not be a separate side quest

In a lot of organisations, the “document workflow” ends with “now send it to another tool for signature”. That adds friction, creates duplicated storage, and makes it harder to keep a clean record.

ShareFile includes e-signature capability as part of the wider collaboration flow, so customers can send documents for signature, track status, and retain the signed documents in the right place.

For partners, this is an easy value conversation. You are not selling “yet another tool”. You are selling one smoother process.

6) Tool sprawl is now a board-level problem, not an IT preference

Customers are increasingly uncomfortable with a patchwork of:

  • email for requests and approvals
  • consumer file sharing for transfers
  • a separate portal somewhere for uploads
  • another tool for e-signature
  • spreadsheets to track what is missing

Every extra system adds risk, training overhead, and operational drag.

ShareFile is positioned as an all-in-one secure collaboration solution, combining secure file sharing, external collaboration, portals, and e-signature in a way that reduces complexity and improves control.

7) Integration is the difference between adoption and shelfware

Even great solutions fail if they do not fit how people work.

ShareFile is designed to integrate with tools customers already rely on, including Microsoft 365, Outlook, Gmail, and Salesforce, helping teams stay productive without constantly context-switching.

For partners, that matters commercially. Integration-led conversations shorten time to value, reduce objections, and make renewals far less painful.

Where partners can start the conversation

If you want a simple opener, go with something your customer will immediately recognise:

  • “How are you collecting sensitive documents from clients today?”
  • “How often do you end up chasing missing documents?”
  • “If you had to prove who accessed a file and when, could you do it easily?”

Then position Progress ShareFile as the practical next step, secure file sharing plus a client portal and workflow, built for organisations that cannot afford messy processes.

See it in action

If you want to understand which plan best maps to your customer’s use case, or you want help positioning the first opportunity, the fastest next step is simple.

Request a demo through Infinigate, and we’ll help you line up the right conversation, the right workflow story, and the right commercial path for your deal.

Contact the team: