agree this is sorely missing.
I want to have a meetings notes doc, but i dont want everyone to see everyone elses notes. I want to have individual note pages per team member that are private to them and me. And I definitely dont want a brand new doc per person.
currently it looks like i need to look outside of Coda for this… and that kind of sucks because im trying to use Coda for as much organization as possible. The lack of privacy and security is a real buzzkill.
Hello @Nurlan_A ,
I am not a fan of Cross-Doc functions and I think there are a lot of ways to avoid using Cross-Doc. With a paid subscription come many other useful features, like a locking mechanism. I really don’t believe that Cross-Doc is an artificial limitation for the purpose of selling subscriptions.
On the record: I am not affiliated with Coda and I have a paid subscription myself (and I use Coda everyday).
Greetings, Joost
Hello @Irfan_Khan ,
Even though I see room for improvements, there are already a few things you can do to make this work pretty good.
Everyone can use the canvas field for note taking and keep their notes private. I think it would be good practice to place a little disclaimer on the page where this all starts saying that notes are semi-private: accessible only for them and for management (or whoever has access.
You can set this up in minutes.
Since users can delete their own notes you might want to make a secured notes log, but that’s for another thread.
Greetings, Joost
PS: this only works reasonably secure for team (and enterprise) subscriptions (because you need page locking to prevent people to tamper your filter settings)
Hey @joost_mineur,
Thank you for your post - at my company we are also facing the problem of managing the privacy within a Coda doc and the approach you presented is very interesting and potentially useful for us.
I see one gap though but maybe you already have it figured out? Namely, if I let only specific users unlock pages within my doc, automatically those selected users become the only ones who can add, move and delete subpages. Our challenge is that on one hand, we’d like to hide some information from the whole audience, but on the other, let everybody develop our doc by adding subpages as deep in the hierarchy as needed.
Have you found a way to address this case? Or do you, in your model, only allow selected users to expand the doc with new subpages?
Kind regards
Adrian
Hello @Adrian_Labecki ,
I work with an authorization scheme with different roles. It was setup as a test to see if I could make it work, where some groups (admins) can access any documents, and other groups only certain documents.
The access is not on a page level, but on a row level (pages can not be properly hidden). Since you can use the canvas column as pages, I use the canvas column.
That said, the canvas pages themselves can’t be protected against (un)intentional alterations (locking does not (yet?) apply to canvas type fields/pages.
So I am not all that certain this can be made to work for nesting.
There is also something else you need to be careful with: if your users make new tables in their canvas, those tables are accessible by making a view on another page.
So, this will work for note-taking, but it does not yet allow for a multilevel secured documentation system.
I have build a couple different solutions and if I have some time I will do some more work on these, but you have to keep in mind that until there is a native (sub)page locking mechanism, the things you build can be pretty secure, but they are not the final solution.
Greetings, Joost
@Coda : 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.
@Andrew_Stinger 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 (esp. when it has to go two ways)
Please come up with a solution with permissions on page level soon.
Hi @anon47149808 –
We hear and understand the priority of this request from our Community! As you might recall from our Coda 3.0 announcement (Coda 3.0: The doc that brings it all together.), we completed a massive overhaul of the core technology that powers Coda’s Editor–this includes everything from how content is laid out on the page, as well the infrastructure supporting other “containers” as well, such as pages and subpages. This was a nearly two-year project, which enabled features you’re hopefully already enjoying like page layouts and canvas columns.
As you can imagine, we had to complete this work before we could address how content can be shared at more discrete “container”-levels that go beyond our current capabilities with docs and folders.
Some of our most senior designers and engineers are actively working on this, but to deliver a solution that honors our makers’ needs for privacy, security, performance, and usability will take some time. I cannot commit to any near-term solutions, but expect we’ll have something to share with our Community in the second half of this year.
In the meantime, please continue sharing your feedback on how you’d use this feature. We’re reading every post and incorporating your insights into our designs and sharing model updates.
Thanks I hope this comes as soon as possible. Coda is amazing but that there are is no decent permission and user rights system is a big problem.
At least you should be able to hide certain pages from some users. CrossDoc is not a good solution for this.
It makes no sense to force people to create additional docs just because there is no decent permission system in place. Not a great user experience. Should be fixed before any new functions.
New to Coda, shocked to see this isn’t possible. For project management cross-docs is simply not a solution as you can only reference the source doc, not edit it. I’m looking to have one doc with a master “tracker” which feeds views in sub-pages for each of the teams. I’d like everyone to be able to view the master and sub-pages but only team-leads would actually be able to edit the project-mgmt related sub-pages which will essentially be views of the master tracker for their team.
We are well into the second half of the year @Andrew_Stinger , is there any further update you can give us?
100% agree. This feature would be a game changer for me!
@ Andrew_Stinger - Any update on this?
This is basically what has held us back from switching from Notion and seems pretty fundamental.
Most important feature right now in my opinion. Is there any update on this?
This! 10,000% This! I’m sure it’s tricky and complicated. That doesn’t change the fact that this would solve some MAJOR problems for me and lots of other users.
Here’s why it’s such a big deal for me. I’m a freelance writing coach and the databases and page structures with in Coda are perfect for helping me track my clients, their purchases, and our session notes (not to mention all the other ways I can use it for my writing and business planning). But as it stands, there is no easy way for me to share a single client’s information without them having access to all of my client information, which is not acceptable for my business model.
So currently I would have to create a separate Doc for each individual client and put these cross-docs and other links in place every single time I get a new client. That’s a lot of manual steps and at that point I might as well stick with google docs.
I didn’t fully understand how the sharing worked when I got my subscription. If there’s no solution by the end of my year-long subscription, I may have to end my account and find another tool to use.
To anyone finding this thread with the sentiment that “Oh but Notion does this!”
Recently I learned it doesn’t.
Or actually, in Notion you can share your text (“wiki”) pages individually — but not database views!
They just don’t get shared… unless you also share the whole table, which — yes — means that whoever sees this page with a view can EASILY see the rest of the base table, i.e. it all gets leaked.
Or, in other words, Notion doesn’t solve the “I need to share a page with a client only containing tasks for that client” either!
This was honestly a shock to me because I was sure this was the one thing that Notion could do that Coda didn’t, and hence so many users were asking for this so fiercely. I thought Notion had server-side calculations to support that safe page-level sharing with all of the data, and that’s why its formula language was so primitive compared to Coda’s. Turned out Notion actually did nothing of that! Sure, I agree that sharing individual wiki pages with a single click is cooler than Coda’s “Copy page to a new doc” feature. But Coda is not so much of a wiki as it is for interconnected tables, and when it comes to tables, Cross-doc is far more superior than what solution exist there with Notion (replicating rows with Make etc.)
Sorry for the rant but actually had to defend Coda on this one.
As a hacker who’s been reverse-engineering Coda and deeply exploring how it works, let me just assure you that sharding a doc into pieces so that you could share a portion of a doc and not leak anything related is an extremely hard feat to accomplish when an app is built like Coda or Notion. It would’ve been a completely different product if it had that separation in its foundation. But as an insider I know that Coda is putting a lot of effort on figuring it out though, so please have faith and patience.
P.S.
As for this, I have a solution, which is not ideal but should help with a lot of pain setting that up:
This should be top priority for coda team. We cant share pages with our clients and current solutions mentioned below are not solving this problem
Alot of people will shift back to notion or other solution just because of this restriction.
Thanks for the feedback. Secure content sharing is one of our top priorities. Emphasis on secure.
~Other~ tools content sharing methods can leak information, which isn’t acceptable when your work depends on it. So we’re designing with security in mind from the get-go. I’ll point you to Ayuba’s post below, in which he outlines our roadmap for content sharing.
There are four steps outlined in the bullet points that build upon one another. We’re already to the third by launching editable Coda page embeds last month. We know the community is excited about this feature, and we’re looking forward to bringing you a solution that is as secure as it is useful.
Airtable has solved this problem.
Airtable doesn’t have the formulas that can take inputs from anywhere in the doc. Either those are formulas that can only access thisRow and rollups, or those have to be calculated through custom code (basically APIs that write calculated values to non-formula cells). In any case, in airtable each row is sufficiently encapsulated and therefore it’s easy to share databases in pieces there.
With Coda and how everything can be interconnected in a Coda doc, not so much.
