Granular Permissions

Just following up here. @Paul_Danyliuk and others have helped to guide me in the direction of thinking of Coda documents as…individual documents, not more. With this mindset, the permissions are comparable to sharing other types of documents, like a Google Sheet, which also don’t offer lower level granularity (e.g. Google sheets do not allow individual Tabs to have individual sharing or permissions).

However in Google Drive, you can have complex folder hierarchies to store documents and control permissions.

I believe this is on the Roadmap, but having subfolders in the main Workspace view, for docs to go into would really help with permissions without requiring changes to the permissions within a doc.

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Another bump for granular permissions.

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I’m being forced by the rest of my team to move to Notion because of the lack of this feature - Notion has group permissions as well which is super handy. Any updates?

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Any updates? This is becoming an issue for us as well…

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We need this as well very urgently!

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Hi everyone! We have what is hopefully some nice progress in this area. Starting today, you can copy a page to a new doc, and adjust the sharing settings of that doc so that your new audience only has access to the new page in the new doc.

Learn more here: Launched: Copy a page to a another doc

Hello @Andrew_Stinger ,

Although I am happy with this new copy option, I don’t think is solves what is asked for (and needed by so many people): the new functions makes it possible to make a new doc in a hurry, but since it is completely independent from the original doc, we now have to maintain one more doc.

Since the power of Coda is that pages can have dynamic content based on other pages, the new doc needs (in many cases) to be connected with cross doc, which is not that great of an option in many situations.

I am sorry to have to conclude that this is not really a step forward towards what is being asked for in this thread.

Greetings, Joost

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Hi Joost,

Thanks for the thoughtful reply! And apologies for apparently not framing my earlier post correctly.

I 100% acknowledge that this does not solve all of the use cases in this thread. However, I did want to share it as progress in our work to be able to securely and safely address those use cases. The ability to migrate full-pages of content to a new “container” with their own access/sharing settings is step forward in our technical capability to one day enable page-level sharing.

While this immediately solves for things like wanting to share a single invoice with a customer without sharing the entire doc from which it was generated, or sharing an RFP with a vendor, you are correct that it does not solve for cases in which you’d like the page contents to remain linked with contents in a broader doc.

If you’d like to know more about how we’re approaching this challenge, our Product Manager Nathan shared more details in this Community Post: Share just one single page? - #10 by nathan

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Hello @Andrew_Stinger ,

Thank you for your reply and explanation. I am aware of the challenges involved for the next step and I am following the thread in which Nathan was posting.

Greetings, Joost

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@nathan is there any update on this feature? Do you have a concrete time line?

The topic has been on the wish list for more than 2years.

The cross doc stuff is complicated and error -prone.

Please come up with a solution with permissions on page level soon.

@jakobheuser and others — now that we have custom packs, I’ve built one for granular permissions on cross-doc tables. It’s not granular permissions on pages but it will enable most of those scenarios already!

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Its kinda disappointing this has not been yet solved after such a long time, its one of the features that will improve usability of Coda (and simplify many docs, eliminating need for cross-doc which is really a bad solution for this problem in many cases) many times and make it viable for many more use cases…

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Just adding another bump for granular permissions.

I am not a software developer, but still have some inkling of how technically difficult it would be to implement granular permissions in Coda, given its power and flexibility, and the need to ensure docs are performant even with thousands upon thousands of rows. It would not surprise me to be told that permissions are a lot easier to implement for Airtable and Notion precisely because they lack some of the power and flexibility of Coda.

So, this is not a complaint, just adding another voice to the ‘signal’ from the userbase that granular permissions are a (the?) top priority for many Coda makers. God speed Codans, we’re counting on you! :laughing:

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I would also like to add another request in this area. I’ve been wanting to make a published doc that only shows data to users that the user is allowed to see. There are two problems

  1. Someone can do @ and see any row in the doc and every person in the doc along with their emails
  2. I can’t just cross doc data from another doc because users need to easily edit. On top of this I need to filter using the User() formula (so that the current user only sees their rows) which does not work over cross doc
    Fixing one of these issues would solve the problem for me, but at the moment, they are significant security problems for what I’m trying to do
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More granular permissions would be nice.

Do you think it would work to use access permissions this way?

Another big vote for granular permissions.

Thoughts on implementation as follows:

  • For pages - edit and/or viewing access controls per page. RE the Codan’s comment above, if elements of that page (tables, formulas) are reference elsewhere that’s fine, the edit/view controls are specific to that page and granted for each user in the doc).

  • For tables - edit access per column/field (Airtable does this quite well, you mentioned other products taking shortcuts, what does that mean in this case? Presumably the edit access per column is on the master version of the table, which would thus be implemented like Airtable did correct?)

I have recently moved from most of my work from Airtable given the immense power and flexibility of Coda, by which I really am incredibly impressed and stoked about!
These granular permissions would really be the icing on the cake of an excellent product!

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Sharing document will be helpful. It help others to know more about it.

Granular permission is absolutely a much needed feature, Any update on this?

This is one of my most difficult challenges when implementing for my clients, especially those who concern about permission and security.