Launched: Share with your Google Contacts

News from Coda
1

Docs bring ideas, teams, words and data together to collaborate, work, and inform. But we’ve heard that sometimes it’s tricky bringing your entire cohort of collaborators together in a doc due to limitations with sharing. When you click ‘Share’ and begin entering the name of a collaborator, not much happens unless you know their email address by heart or your workspace is configured to help you auto-complete colleagues’ names.

We’re changing that, and making it easier to share docs with your Google Contacts.

Starting today, when you enter the sharing flow, you’ll have an option to connect to Google Contacts. After you authorize your account, typing a few letters will generate suggestions based on the people in your existing list of Google Contacts, including people you have emailed from Gmail.

74674e4ca563513cc4b04eb66912c769

Syncing with Google Contacts will also help you add people from your contacts to People Columns in your docs.

This option is available to all Coda users, independent of whether you use Google Login or a custom Email + Password combination to login to Coda. To see your Google Contacts, simply visit http://contacts.google.com/ and note that the list also includes people in the “frequently contacted” section so you likely have contacts even if you have never added them directly.

In general, if you’ve emailed someone from Gmail, shared an event with someone from Google Calendar, or used other Google services to connect with people via their email address, they should be available for sharing if you enable Google Contacts import from the Sharing menu or your account settings.

Note that this operates separate from our Google Contacts Pack; enabling the import for sharing does not automatically install the Pack for use in your docs, nor vice-versa. Additionally, please be advised that this process is enabled via the Google People API. For details on security and privacy associated with the API, please visit Google’s API Guide.

We hope this makes it easier to share your docs with your intended collaborators, and removes some steps of having to track down email addresses for sharing.

15 Likes
2

Very cool! A follow up question I had was re-associating your Google email account in the People’s column. I accidentally chose a Google account I didn’t want for a particular doc but haven’t been able to figure out how to remove and associate the other one, or add multiple. Is that possible at this point? BTW, I stumbled upon this a day or two ago, that’s how I realized this, but I just checked again after this post and still was uncertain.

3

Hey @Tim_Sherrod, you should be able to change your connected account via account settings – simply hit “Disconnect” and you can reconnect another account.

4

Uh-oh – in an unforeseen turn of events I regret that we’ll need to temporarily disable this feature until we sort a kink out with Google, which is unfortunately taking longer due to reduced staffing due to COVID-19.

We’ll post here when this feature is re-enabled! In the meantime, let us know what you think about this as a whole and if there are any other integrations you’d love to see, specifically for sharing and mentioning people.

EDIT: the issue was resolved and this was re-enabled.

2 Likes
5

Nice feature @oleg! :grin:
This could allow user like me (who wants to “sell” access to docs) to easily manage users thanks to google contacts, could be possible to integrate something like “just a particular group of users are allowed” instead of every contact? :slight_smile:
Thanks :grin:

6

We’d like to get not only email from Google Contacts who are added to People column, but e.g.: People.Mobile or People.Workspace or People.Labels using Formula.

I assume it’s already included but I mention that we’d also like to be able to send a notification email using a button in a row, to the row’s People column (who might not have a Coda account, but in my Google Contacts).

2 Likes
7

Thanks for sharing @oleg :pray: do you have additional news about inviting people/earning credits as all these invited people will be new Coda users?

1 Like
8

Oleg,

Yes, this will make it easier to share within Coda but at what cost? Will my contacts be kept private to just me or will they be pulled info the Coda system for other potentail purposes (both now and in the future)? What assurances do I have of Coda’s intentions?

1 Like
9

@Mario not at the moment – this is mostly in place to help you get autocomplete for people you may have emailed in Gmail or otherwise have in your contacts. We don’t pull in groups, though a workaround for your case could be to create a Google Group and share your doc with that email.

1 Like
10

@Thomas_Schulz we don’t have plans to integrate referrals with sharing/people columns at this time.

@rwd, good question! As with Packs integrations, the contacts pulled in here are considered private customer data and used strictly for the functional purpose of making it easier to share docs and find people. Our intentions are only to use this integration with explicit user interaction, and as I had mentioned earlier we’ve gone through a rigorous process with Google to get cleared for access. Please reference our privacy policy for more details on how we safeguard customer data.

11

Hi @oleg sorry for the late answer :sweat_smile:
I’m really curious about the future of this and how users will be managed if they will became thousand :smiley:
Please update this thread if some news about bulk access permission will be updated,
Thanks :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

12

For such a use case, I’d actually recommend creating a separate workspace for the docs you’d like to share/sell, and adding users who purchased access to those docs as Viewers, so they’d have access to them. Longer term I think we’d be able to address your scenario more elegantly. :slight_smile:

2 Likes
13

Hi Oleg, I can’t understand how to use the Column Group functionality: i would like to filter che contacts pertaining a particular group but it seems you can only filter one group at a time and also when i try to add a contact with the dedicated button pack it doesn’t work if i try tu use the group i have in google .
Are you thinking about to set an example or tutorial on how to use the Google Contacts pack? I can’t find any example out there and i would really be able to integrate in my coda experience