The bigger the team, the more difficult it is to coordinate. Inspired by suggestions from customers with large deployments, we've introduce user groups as one of the killer highlights in the new Wrike Enterprise plan. This feature lets admins organize users by project, department or location, allowing you to share data with multiple users effortlessly.
Buckle up and we'll give you the quick tour!
on your workspace. This is where you will manage users in the account, get detailed overviews of groups and users, invite new users, and add users to groups
Default User Groups: Overview of User Types
By default, every user in your account is categorized into one of these 5 groups based on the user license:
Regular users can access all Wrike features and see other users’ info, such as their time spent on tasks and their scheduled tasks on the timeline, among many other things.
External users have the same abilities as regular users, except they can only see the info of users who have shared folders with them.
Collaborators can view and complete tasks, add comments and attach files. Just like external users, they can only view the people with whom they share folders and tasks.
The Invitation Pending group includes invited users who haven’t signed up yet. Consider resending or canceling the invitation.
Ungrouped users are not included in any custom group (see the next section).
Custom User Groups: Visualize Your Organization’s Structure
While default groups are predefined and identical for every account, custom user groups and subgroups represent the actual employee clusters in your organization. Dividing users into groups is also extremely useful for selective data-sharing, as it helps managers quickly adjust user access to folders and tasks.
Note that you can include one user in several groups at once. One of your developers, Emma, may decide to take part in the next volunteer event and thus should be included in the “Developer” and “Volunteers” groups.
Best Practices for User Groups
1. “User Group” Thinking
You can save a lot of time and effort if you think in terms of groups, rather than users. Next time you create a project folder, share it with a group, rather than individual users. This way, all your designers can follow the updates to a new brochure.
Keep in mind that if you share a folder with a group:
The folder becomes shared with all subgroups under the main user group.
You won’t be able to unshare the folder from a subgroup or from a person in this group.
It’s impossible to unshare a subfolder or any task in this folder from this group.
This way, you’re sure that important data cannot be overlooked or mistakenly unshared by any of the group members.
2. One-Click Onboarding Process
In fast-growing companies, new employees join up on a regular basis. This is a challenge for project managers who need to provide newcomers with access to the data they need to hit the ground running. User groups make it easy. As you add each of the new employees to a group (say, new copywriters added to the “Marketing” group), they instantly get access to all the folders shared within that group.
Pro tip: Create a special “Welcome” folder with materials for newcomers (guides, official instructions, onboarding documentation, lists of crucial tasks) and share it with the “Newcomers” group. This way, new employees can see it the minute they are added to the “Newcomers” group.
3. Organizational Chart
Using groups as a hierarchy is a great way to illustrate your team's structure. Whether you choose to group users by project or location, one look at the group tab is enough to glean insight about the different teams in the account.
Overview done! Now go manage your user groups like a boss.
Wrike Team
Occasionally we write blog posts where multiple people contribute. Since our idea of having a gladiator arena where contributors would fight to the death to win total authorship wasn’t approved by HR, this was the compromise.
Folder Permissions: Greater Control Over Data Editing Rights
For many of you, Wrike has become the central hub for collaborating with team members, contractors, freelancers, clients, and partners. But as companies grow and projects begin to involve more and more people, many of you began asking us for the ability to provide more granular control over data management in Wrike, allowing you to keep company structure under control, while still giving departments a space to work without bureaucratic restrictions. In this case, the brand new Wrike Enterprise feature, folder permissions, comes in very handy because it allows you to choose what different users or user groups can do within the shared folders.For many of you, Wrike has become the central hub for collaborating with team members, contractors, freelancers, clients, and partners. But as companies grow and projects begin to involve more and more people, many of you began asking us for the ability to provide more granular control over data management in Wrike, allowing you to keep company structure under control, while still giving departments a space to work without bureaucratic restrictions. In this case, the brand new Wrike Enterprise feature, folder permissions, comes in very handy because it allows you to choose what different users or user groups can do within the shared folders.
Two Access Levels: Full and Limited Imagine you've just launched a big project. You've carefully thought out its main phases, defined possible task statuses, set up milestones, and reflected all this neatly organized project structure in Wrike. Now you face a challenge. You need to keep this structure unchanged while sharing project data with people you need to collaborate with: employees, clients, and third-party vendors. On the one hand, you need to limit their access to data by restricting their rights to move and delete folders, but on the other hand, you need to give departments the full freedom to manage tasks within their areas of responsibility. This challenge can be easily handled with Wrike's folder permissions. You can easily customize user rights for each folder.
Let’s take a closer look at this much-awaited feature. Wrike Enterprise now gives an individual user one of two levels of access to a folder: full or limited. A user with FULL access has exclusive rights to share the folder with others and change the access levels of other users. Your current experience when sharing folders is quite similar to full access, but without the ability to set other users' access levels. LIMITED access restricts users' editing and sharing rights for a certain folder (including all its subfolders and tasks), so that they become limited to Collaborator’s rights. It means that users can still view tasks, add comments, attach files, and mark the task completed in a certain folder, while they won’t be able to edit or manage the tasks and subfolders in it. So why add the “Limited access” option for users if we already have the “Collaborator” license in Wrike? Because these two license options have several significant differences:
Collaborator
User with “Limited access” rights
Right to create and edit tasks and folders
Can’t create or edit any tasks or folders in Wrike
Adjustable on the folder level (The admin may allow the user to edit some folders, while providing limited access to others)
Premium feature access (e.g., the Gantt chart, dashboard, advanced filters, etc.)
No
Yes
Price and amount
Free and unlimited
According to the subscription plan
This way, in terms of price and functionality, a Collaborator license may be a great option for working with freelancers. At the same time, a User license with the limited access is a better alternative for collaborating with clients because it allows the client to create and maintain a backlog of tasks, and even track the project progress on the Gantt chart, building customized reports with the help of advanced filters. Extra tip: Consider providing your newcomers with limited access to main folders. It helps you avoid issues with erroneous renaming of tasks/folders and accidental reorganization of folder structures. The same principle is valid for a cross-functional team. If one department just needs to reference the work of the other department (e.g. your marketing and analytical departments), then consider providing them with limited access to other departments' folders. Making it Work for You Here are some insights that should make access rights distribution more efficient:
Use case
Action required
Examples
Private folders that shouldn’t be viewed by anyone
Don’t share folder with anyone
* Personal to-do lists
* Top secret business data
Folders with tasks that need review, discussion, and tracking without editing task content and folder structure
Set limited access to users
* Cross-functional projects
* Collaboration with third-party vendors
* Newcomers
Work in progress tasks and folders that should be managed and edited
Provide users with full access to folders
* Team members
* Outsourced workforce (consider external user licenses)
Setting the Access Level Who exactly is responsible for giving users access rights? All the users with full access rights who share a certain folder can adjust the access rights of other users for this folder and all its subfolders. What about setting an access level for user groups? In Wrike Enterprise, access can be set at both the individual user level and the user group level. Just remember that rights are always upgraded, never downgraded. So if a group has full access rights to a folder, then you can’t downgrade a single group member to limited access to that same folder. On the other hand, if the entire group has limited access, a user with full access can upgrade the level of a particular user.
< To safeguard against folders becoming black holes where no one can make any revisions, there will always be one person with full access to a folder. The last user with full access won’t be able to downgrade his or her access rights (or unfollow the folder) until he or she has given full access to at least one other user.
Important Facts to Remember
A users’ access rights are inherited by all subfolders of a particular folder. If a user has a full access rights in a particular folder, all subfolders inherit the same access rights. The same logic works for limited access levels. Remember that you can change users’ access levels to a subfolder from limited to full, but never vice versa.
If the access rights of different user groups in a particular folder vary, a user who is a part of these user groups will always inherit the higher access level. For instance, if a folder is shared with two user groups with different access levels, and you are part of both groups, you will always have full access rights. The case with different folders is very similar. If the folder is included in two others that are both shared with you (but you have different access rights for each), you will always inherit full access to this folder.
Hopefully this gives you an idea how Wrike Enterprise can give you more control over data editing rights. Remember that a granular approach to the data-sharing in your company makes collaboration much smoother. To best understand folder permissions, you should take it for a test drive right now. Drop us a note at https://www.wrike.com/contact-sales/!
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Accelerate Your Business with Wrike's New Custom Workflows
Your teams all have their own specific workflows. You need a platform that supports all of them. Today we're excited to introduce Custom Workflows, letting your teams structure their work so it moves faster and everyone knows where things stand. Now you can create workflows for everything from approval processes to bug tracking to content development and more.
"Custom statuses have helped us streamline our development workflow and allow us to track tickets through our development pipeline."
—Jeremy Rose, Vice President of Operations @SimpleRelevance
Getting Started
Setting up workflows is quick and easy. Account admins can create and edit workflows from the Account settings page. After you save changes, the new workflow will be available to your team in their workspace.
Here are some common workflows to get you started:
Once created, users can assign workflows to a team or project by right clicking on a folder and changing the workflow setting. Then, tasks in that folder will reflect the new workflow in the status menu.
Now that you've implemented your workflow, build dashboards for real-time visibility into where everything stands.
"The custom statuses help make the workflow much simpler, and allow us to create dashboards to capture tasks with this "Review" status. Thanks for a great feature!"
—Andrew Hartman, Senior Director of Product Management and Platform Operations at CastNet Group
Custom Workflows are now available to all Wrike Enterprise customers. Not yet on Wrike Enterprise? Sign up for a free trial today.
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Stop Projects from Derailing With Wrike's New Report Templates
Wrike’s new Report Templates help project managers and team members instantly pinpoint problems so you can resolve them on the spot.
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