Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Project sharing

This article explains how project sharing works in Papeeria.

Short summary

When Alice who is Papeeria user wants to collaborate on her project with Bob who is not yet registered she
  1. Asks Bob to register on Papeeria and sign in
  2. Generates a sharing link and sends it to Bob
  3. Having signed in, Bob clicks the sharing link and joins the project
See the details below.

Sharing options

If you want to share your project with someone, you have a few options.
  • You can grant access to a few people of your choice, with either read or write permissions. 
  • You can also make your project public, and everyone will be able to read and compile your project. However, even in public projects only those users who are explicitly granted write access will be able to edit files.

All these options are available in the Sharing Settings dialog which you can open using Share button in the workspace or in the dashboard.

Sending invitations

If you want to invite your colleague to join your project, you need to contact him and give him some key or secret. If you were sitting in the same room, you could just say "Hey, dude, let's work on this together! Go to Papeeria and use s3Cr3Tw000rD to access the project". Your peer signs into Papeeria, types the secret word and you're done.

Sharing dialog

Sharing dialog works exactly that way, but uses secret links instead of words. The easiest scenario looks as follows
  1. Generate a pair of secret links by clicking On radio button in Link Sharing section.
  2. Choose Read or Write link and click it to copy to the clipboard
  3. Send the link using your favorite communication tool
Your collaborators need to be registered and signed in in order to be able to join with you in collaborating. Links are long-lived, you can send the same link to any number of people. If you need to invalidate the links, switch Link Sharing off. This will make previously generated links invalid and if you decide to switch link sharing back on, you will generate new links.

We can also send one-off links to your collaborators by email. They work the same way, except that we automatically send an email and automatically invalidate the link once it is used. To send one-off links:
  1. Type collaborator's email addresses Collaborators table, change permissions if needed and click Add
  2. Optionally add a text message to be wrapped into the email
  3. Click Done

Email recipients will have to register and sign in, and once they click the invitation link they will gain the associated permission to read or write your project.

Managing access

No matter what link did you use to share the project, all collaborators show up in the table and you can manage their permissions or revoke access completely.