Closing Your Session

You can close your NetDocuments session in one of three ways:

1. Click the Logout link at the top right of your browser at any time

2. Click the browser's File|Close menu option

3. Click the X at the top right corner of the browser window

Note: As a general practice, NetDocuments recommends that you click the Logout link when you have completed your session with NetDocuments rather than option 2 or 3.  This allows NetDocuments to completely close your connection to the server and to remove trailer information such as the existing session cookie. 


Technical Information for Administrators

NetDocuments operates across several servers.  As users login to the service, they are distributed across these servers by a load balancer.  At the time of login, the load balancer creates a session cookie which is used to direct all subsequent requests in that login session to the same server.  If a user clicks Logout, NetDocuments removes the session cookie, which ensures that the next time the user logs in to NetDocuments, the load balancer can direct the new session to the server that is currently providing optimum response times.

Internet Explorer keeps a connection open to a server for one minute after the last request is sent to that server, so if the user immediately logs back into NetDocuments after logging out, and without closing the browser, he will be directed to the same server even though the cookie has been deleted.  For this reason the Logout page instructs the user to close the browser window and open a new browser window before logging back into NetDocuments.

After approximately one minute and 15 seconds, this message is changed to a link to the Login page.  At that point the connection to the server has been closed, and a subsequent login will be treated as a new session by the load balancer.