There are two main approaches to managing access to projects in Drawboard Projects: doing it project-by-project (this used to be the only option) or using workspace-wide permissions. These two methods can be summarized as:
Managing access project-by-project
You can invite people to a single project and give them a role on that project. If you want to invite one person to many projects, you invite them to each project individually.
Managing access workspace-wide
You can invite people to a workspace, and give them a workspace-wide Default Project Role, a role that applies to all public projects in the workspace. They'll automatically have access to any public project in the workspace with no further steps.
As you work on more projects or your team grows, managing access on a project-by-project basis can become increasingly time-consuming. To help manage access at scale, we suggest managing permissions at a workspace level.
How does workspace-wide access control work?
Every project in Drawboard Projects lives in a workspace. Every project has a Project Access setting which can be either "public" or "private". Public projects can be seen by everyone in the workspace, and Private projects can only be seen by the people listed in the project team, and will be hidden from other workspace members.
The best approach for your team
You need to decide on practices that strike the right balance for your team between information security and operational efficiency. You may use project-by-project access control on private projects for sensitive projects, and provide access easily to all other projects using public projects and workspace-wide access management.
For a very light touch approach:
- Create a workspace, add all your team members;
- Set all projects to public;
- Manage permissions for all your projects in one place, on the workspace members screen.
To go the opposite route and make your environment very secure,
- Use different workspaces to segregate teams;
- Use a mix of public and private projects as fits the security profile for each project.
- Set confidential projects to private and manage the project team separately
Configuring workspace-wide access control
Navigate to the project list, click the More (three dots) icon for the project you wish to configure and select Project settings. If you're already inside the project, click the More (three dots) icon in the top-right of the screen and choose Project settings.
To set up Project Access, first decide if the project will be Public or Private.
Public projects are viewable by everyone in the workspace
Private projects can only be seen by the people listed in the project team
If the project is set to Private, there's nothing more to do here. Admins can invite individuals to the project team and no-one else will be able to see or access it.
If the project is set to Public, the next step is deciding whether to use the workspace-wide role configured in the workspace members screen or whether you want to override this and force all workspace members to have a specific access role. The two options are:
Inherit project access roles from the workspace: Every member of the workspace gets the level of access given to them in the "Default Project Role" attribute set within the workspace. Essentially you're outsourcing access control to the workspace admins who have already decided what access all members of the workspace will get to this project.
Every workspace member is a(n) Admin | Collaborator | Reader: The workspace-wide "Default Project Role" attribute is ignored, and instead every member of the workspace gets the level of access set here.
See these other articles for more information:
Example setups
Here are some ways of configuring Projects
Read-only project library
For projects that are no longer active, create a workspace named Completed Projects and transfer projects into this when they're completed. Add all the members of your team to this workspace with a Project Access Role of Reader, so that everyone in the team can open these projects but can't make changes. All of the original project team members will still be able to access them with the roles specified in the project team settings
Work easily with multiple clients or partners
If you work with a number of clients or partners and have multiple projects that you work on with each, you could configure Projects in this way:
- Create a workspace for each client/partner
- In each workspace, invite the members of your team that work with that client, and the members of the client team
- Set the workspace-level Project role for the active members of the team to Collaborator
- You might have team members who provide oversight and who you want to invite with a workspace-level Project Role of Reader
- For all the projects in this workspace, set the Project Access to Public and Inherit project access roles from the workspace
- Manage all the permissions from the workspace!