BIM 360 Design - Give pending members and companies permissions

[jkidder]

Currently you can't give companies or members to permissions until they are/have an "active" member in the project.  This is a major problem for us, as we would like to complete project set up at one time.  It frustrates our external team members, because inevitably when they activate their membership in the project they don't have access to the folders and collaboration modules that they need.  We end up with a piecemeal project setup, and it makes us seem incompetent for not giving them the access they need.

You should at least be able to assign permissions to any person or company that has a member in the project, including those whose status is "Pending".  Preferably, you could give companies (similar to this idea) permissions before the project has any users.  Often when projects are being set up the consultant companies are known, but the team members are not.  It would also be very helpful if project templates could have permissions for companies assigned.  That would allow templates for common teams to be created ahead of time, reducing and streamlining the project setup.

[lukas.hennel]

I thought about the same issue already....

What about using roles in the beginning of a project instead? Roles can be assigned even though there is no user added to a role. When adding a new project member in Account admin you can predefine a role and change this on entering the project. I think this helps when setting up a project and giving access to folders / teams while they are still pending.

Please let me know if this would be a proper solution to handle this? 

[jkidder]

@lukas.hennel It would be an option, but not one that would be as intuitive or easy to implement. 

First of all, those roles come with other defaults that would need to be researched and teams made aware of before implementing. 

Secondly, we don't always know the roles, so may leave them blank, or would end up giving users incorrect roles to achieve the desired access.  Generally there are a number of designers on our teams, and the platform doesn't have a way to designate which for which discipline they are designing.  Architect (and I assume Engineer) are titles that indicate licensure, and it is inappropriate to assign them to people who do not have that licensure. 

Third, teams (at least in our office) are associated with companies.  It is much easier to give one company full access to their folders, and reciprocal view access to the other teams, then it is to do for a longer list of roles.

Fourth, the option of using roles falls apart when there are two teams with the same roles, such as two architecture teams collaborating together.

[lukas.hennel]

@jkidder 

True! It is not intuitive and you have to give it a lot of thoughts before using it.

I would agree that this is a workaround and not a solution for the issue. Especially if we talk about bigger projects with several different designer teams this is going to be a mess ... 

It would be very helpful to let project admins assign folder access to invited users / companies ... Like creating a matrix before starting a project. I totally agree that this is helpful for project admins

[Unknown_Account59]

I appreciate this idea is related to the Design module, but it sounds like Document Management works the same way... 

We are currently using Roles to assist with giving members the basic access rights to the required folders. We are only using the 'Owner' role, for the Client team, and 'Contractor' role, for everyone else. Autodesk - It would be very helpful if custom Role names could be added by Account Admins. 

The Project Admin still needs to tailor the permissions so the member can upload content to their own folder, but as this can only be done once 1 active member is on the system, we've found the above to be a good workaround, so at least they aren't faced with a blank screen the first time they do log in. 

[Joerg.WilleJVFYP]

I have following workaround, still wasting time, when setting up a project....
I invite a member from a new company (creating the new company) - on project admin level (no root admin).

Afterwards, I want to assign access rights to 'New Company' members in general.
So I do assign the NEW COMPANY to a 'Testuser' or existing user - assign the rights - change back the Testuser company assignment.

That works, but costs time.
I would appreciate that AutoDesk get this fixed.

BR
Joerg