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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/!
