Launched: Simpler, smoother doc sharing

[Tommy_Hung]

Whether you’re managing a confidential project or building a repository of helpful information for your entire company, the ability to confidently share your doc with the right audience, at the right time, is crucial. With Coda, you’re able to share a doc with an individual person, a group of people who have access to a folder, all members of your workspace, or even publish docs to be discovered by the whole world.

With so many options, we heard your feedback that it can be a bit confusing to understand who has access to which docs, and so we’ve updated the interface for sharing docs to remove any doubt and ambiguity.

Here’s what you can expect to see when you share your docs, starting today:

Confirm and manage access all in one screen.

No more having to toggle between menus in the share dialog, or between your workspace, folders, and docs to see who has access. Now, when you click “Share” in Coda, you’ll see everyone who has access to your doc — whether you’ve shared it with them directly, or they have access by being a member of your domain or folder.

Help new invitees start in the right spot.

Previously, any time you shared a doc with an individual, the only option was for them to land on the first page of the doc. Now, you can choose between the “current page” (that is, the page you’re viewing when you click “Share”) or the first page of your doc. Drop your collaborators directly into the most appropriate starting point.

Note: This does not enable sharing only a specific page or pages within a doc, though we’ve heard this request loud and clear (and would still love your feedback on scenarios where you’d need such a feature!)

A new home for advanced settings.

In order to make the sharing screen clearer and less cluttered, your advanced settings have moved one click away, behind the slider icon next to the “x” you would click to dismiss the sharing settings screen. Click this icon to choose from the following options

• Allow anyone who can edit to change permissions and share.
• Allow anyone to copy this doc.
• Share with Coda support.

And few more helpful updates.

• We’ve made it more clear that you can share your doc to new contacts who might not already be a part of your Coda workspace.
• When inviting individual users, we let you edit the message they’ll see in their inbox if you choose to notify them (and gave you a running start with some pre-filled message options).
• When you “Copy Link” to share your doc, we show a helpful reminder to update your doc’s share settings before distributing its link.

[rwd]

This looks to be a great step forward. I would like to see Coda take a further step to make sharing more granular. It needs to be beyond the document level to the page level.

[Spirit_Guides_Info]

It looks like the topic you linked to re: only sharing specific pages in a doc is closed for comment.

For me, the real value is limiting employee access to specific pages of the doc. For example, we operate the entire business in one consolidated doc (which works very well for keeping all of our data seamlessly integrated). One of these elements is managing orders and shipments, which is directly integrated with our inventory management (a separate page on the same doc) and our analytics (tracking all sales). I would love an option to give access to only our shipping management page, without giving access to general analytics and other bigger picture items. A basic implementation of limiting which pages are accessible per login paired with the already existing features of doc locking would suit my needs (and perhaps many others).

Thanks for reading!
Jeremy

[Stefan_Stoyanov]

The same feeling when I spend 20 min. nurturing my daughter to brush her theeth and then she says “Daddy, I am hungry”

Updated UI and… that’s really all! While the community is frustrated to the bones by the lack of options and functioanlity of the sharing.

I am getting a

[Nad]

@Spirit_Guides_Info, spot on.
For highly interactive workflows, we typically have separate teams working on what is essentially the same underlying big table, bouncing it back and forth between teams using button actions. No one team should be able to see or fiddle with the other team’s views. Lord knows I tried to get this separation working via cross-doc and it’s painful, unstable, and brittle.
I really wish we were allowed to fully embrace the ‘monolith’, and use locking + individual page sharing to restrict access.

[Andrew_Stinger]

Hi there! Apologies for the confusing UX in the community – if you read thru to the end of comments on the linked post, there should still be a “Reply” button (the “closed for comment” notice is about a specific thread of replies).

We’d still really love your feedback on sharing portions of a doc, most notably on the questions my teammate Nathan flagged in the comments of the post:

1. What should happen to views of tables that are not included in the share, or formulas that refer to other parts of the document?
2. And how should we handle security for users that are creative at seeing everything that comes across to their machine - should we not transmit unshared data?

[Ryan_Martens2]

I’m still confused. At the bottom of that thread I see neither a big blue reply button nor a grey thread reply button.

I see this:

Instead of this:

Am I missing something?

[Irfan_Khan]

@Andrew_Stinger that topic is closed to the public. perhaps admins/codans have different permissions but its not available at all for me.

[Irfan_Khan]

@Andrew_Stinger

• What should happen to views of tables that are not included in the share, or formulas that refer to other parts of the document?
• And how should we handle security for users that are creative at seeing everything that comes across to their machine - should we not transmit unshared data?

Good questions, im sure many people dont appreciate the complexity of these things.
the simple answer is to give the user the option. i understand this can break things if not handled well. let the user decide per table if they want to restrict data to authorized viewers or not. if not authorized the user will see a notice.

the admin can maybe decide:

1. allow all shared table data to be seen by any pages the table is on, including formulas, etc
   2)allow only data thats related to the specific table view to be seen. any formula columns not authorized will be view only. buttons linked to unshared columns dont work.
2. restrict the table so that table isnt viewable by unauthorized people at all.

personally i like a column by column level of authorization. if formulas reference others, then give a pop up to decided if you want to share those additional columns. many of those shares realistically just need to be view-only because many will be lookups that dont need manipulation.

regarding transmission of unshared data… yes if possible just dont send it. if someone’s getting even more creative to dig deep then perhaps a different platform in general is better. I would like to have personnel files on coda. Id like to lock down certain columns so they dont get transmitted and that data wouldnt be visible to anyone else. If i needed something half-way then i could create a helper column with pasted values so only hard coded values go thru while the underlying data isnt transmitted.

hope those ramblings help.

[Andrew_Stinger]

My apologies! You’re correct - I did have an admin view of the topic.

Feel free to share your feedback in the comments here, and we’ll pass along to the product team exploring more sharing scenarios. Thanks!

[Christopher_Cat]

Coda Noob here (my first community post)
One thing I do to limit sharing is set a filter on my tables User()=[table of authorised users].[name].
The table of authorised users is kept on a locked page.
This way unauthorised people can see the page but none of the data in the table on that page which has the filter.
Of course, if they can edit the page, they can remove the filter, but many of my team don’t know coda that well.

[Christiaan_Huizer]

indeed @Christopher_Cat , until @Coda1 puts in place a well designed permission management system we solve issues like this in a practical manner. However it It feels a bit fragile like receiving a locked excel sheet, you open via google sheets and all out of a sudden the locking is gone.