We have an exciting update on a highly requested feature that makes folders more powerful in Coda — we now support sharing folders with ’can view’, ‘can comment’ or ‘can edit’ access.
Our goal is to offer more flexible and convenient organization options for teams in Coda. For example: Imagine you create a folder with docs on employee benefits and company policies. You can now share the folder with anyone in your workspace with ‘can view’ access, but grant ‘can edit’ access only to the members on the HR team. This feature is available to all users on Team and Enterprise.
With this latest update there are a number of changes and improvements:
- Instead of managing folder membership using the “Folder members” panel on the right, Folder permissions and access levels are now managed via a sharing dialog, mirroring doc permissions. From this sharing dialog, we support sharing to the workspace (akin to toggling whether a folder was private previously), sharing to individual user’s emails, and sharing to groups, each with ‘can edit’, ‘can comment’, ‘can view’ access options.
Before: You could see the folder members via the Folder members panel on the right.
Now: You can click on the sharing dialog to see all the folder members and their access on the folder.
- The doc sharing dialog will now list all permissions that are inherited from the folder (previously we showed access to the folder name as a distinct line item). In the case that both the folder and the doc were shared with the user directly, you will see their effective permission (i.e most permissive access) on the doc’s sharing dialog. E.g. if a user inherits a ‘can edit’ permission from a folder but previously had a ‘can view’ permission assigned via the doc directly, the user’s effective permission will show as ‘can edit’.
- Only users with ‘can edit’ access to the folder can make changes to a folder’s permissions.
- Going forward, if you’re on Team / Enterprise, you would no longer see “Shared folders” and “Private folders” as two different folder types. Any folder you create will be private and not shared with anyone by default. You can then share the folder with individual users / groups if you only want some people to have access to the folder, or share the folder with anyone in your workspace if you want all workspace members to have access to the folder. Sharing the folder with ‘anyone in the workspace’ is the equivalent of ‘Shared folders’.
- To manage the folders listed on the lefthand menu of your workspace, you can now shortcut folders. You can view all the folders you have access to by clicking on the “view all” button next to Folders on the lefthand menu. From here, you can add a shortcut by clicking on the star button that’s next to the folder name. Folder shortcuts will appear on the lefthand menu of your workspace and appear only for yourself.
With this feature release, you should be automatically migrated to the new functionality. More precisely:
- Folder permissions will exactly reflect existing folder access. Existing folder members and groups will show as user/group permissions with ‘can edit’ in the sharing dialog respectively.
- Existing “Shared” folders will be now be folders that are shared with anyone in the workspace with ‘can edit’ access. Existing “private” folders will have this workspace permission set as ‘no access’.
- Folders you’ve “joined” will show as bookmarked folders on the lefthand menu of your workspace.
Overall, moving forward you can always click on the share button to share the folder with individual users or with the whole workspace, and also determine what level of access they should have on the folder.
Note: When a user is added to a folder, their permission can always be made more permissive on individual docs within the folder. But their access level on a specific doc cannot be made less permissive than the permission they have at the folder level.
So what’s next?
We are committed to taking all your valuable feedback, and incorporating it into our roadmap. Although we cannot commit to a specific timeline, we are excited to share that our roadmap includes the following key features:
- Sharing folders with non-workspace members: Today, folders can only be directly shared with workspace members. However, there are many use cases to support sharing folders with non-workspace members (e.g. for organizations that work with contractors that shouldn’t have access to the whole workspace). It is on our roadmap to support sharing folders with non-workspace members, so that customers can more easily collaborate over a set of documents with users without necessarily adding and giving them access to the entire workspace. Note: one current workaround is if you share with Google / SCIM groups, group members can access docs in a folder if they’re not workspace members.
- Folder admins and subfolders: Once we rollout folder permissions, as a natural next step we’re considering introducing folder admins to help customers have more granular control over who can manage folders. In addition to that, we are also planning to support sub-folders that will allow customers to nest folders within a folder and organize information better.
Huge thanks to this community for your continued feedback on folders! Please let us know if you have any questions. You can also learn more about sharing folders and folder permissions, by visiting our help article here.
