There are several ways of working with external partners (which can be combined). These are ranked below from the most restrictive to the most permissive:
Share them a view/card via a url
You can generate a share url for a view or a card via their actions menu (the “…”).
You can give this URL to your partners who will then see exactly the content of your view/card.
For a view, they will be able to open any card and see its contents. For a card, all of its content will be available to them.
Via these shared URLs they will have no right to edit cards and fields, only a right to consult.
It is not necessary for them to create a Kantree account and therefore they do not use a Kantree license (paid in the plan chosen by your company).
They will therefore not have a Kantree home page that lists all the view/card URLs that have been shared with them, they will have to take care of keeping them themselves.
Invite them as members of your workspace
As a guest, your partners are members of a workspace and have unlimited access to all data (unlike view/card URL sharing which is limited to those you have shared):
- all cards
- all fields in cards
- all views (except those in the “private view” section, but they could easily produce identical views)
You can assign them a role to limit their editing rights, until they have no particular right except to consult the workspace (Observer role).
On the other hand, it is not possible to limit the access rights to certain fields/cards/views on a workspace for a given member/role.
To access the workspace, your partners must create an account on your Kantree environment.
They then see the project on their Kantree homepage and can open it.
In the case of our “Team” and “Business” cloud offers, please note that only the “Observer” role is available for guests on a workspace. They then do not use a Kantree license (paid in the plan chosen by your company).
In the case of a dedicated Kantree environment (“Enterprise” offer), please note that they will then use a Kantree license (paid in the plan chosen by your company) for this use, unless you ask your Kantree administrator to give them the status “Not licensed” on your Kantree server. In this case, they will be limited to the observer role and can neither be assigned to cards nor comment. They will appear as “Free access” in the list of members of your workspace
Invite them as contractors in your organization
This option is only available as part of our “Team” and “Business” cloud offers
It is possible to invite your partners as “Contractors” at the level of your organization.
In this case, you can invite them to any workspace in your organization and give them any role.
They then see the project on their Kantree homepage and can open it, but they do not have access to your organization’s hub and cannot join your workspaces on their own. you will have to manually invite them.
As with the previous point, they can access all the data in your workspace.
“Contractors” use Kantree licenses (paid for in your company’s chosen plan).
Other alternatives
Share forms
On any workspace, you can create a form.
These forms can be “public”, and thus your partners can access the URL of the form, fill it in (by giving an email address) and send it.
This will create:
- a card in your workspace (which will be completed with the data from the form, each form field must be associated with a card field)
- a request page for your partner, which will take in their answers from the form. Optionally, you can allow a partner to modify his/her answers via this page or to write a comment (which will be converted into a comment on the card of the associated workspace). This query page is completely optional.
You can comment on the card by choosing to have this comment appear on your partner’s request page. The latter will then be notified by email of this new comment.
Your partners will only have access to the request pages that they have generated themselves. Unless you also share a view with them (see point 1).
Your partners don’t need a Kantree account or license (paid for in your company’s chosen plan) to submit public forms.
Automatic sending of email
On any workspace you can configure action rules that are triggered automatically according to a criteria.
One of these actions is sending email. These emails are generated from a template that you have previously created.
In this template you can integrate dynamic data taken from a card. All you have to do is enter your partner’s email address to have these emails sent to them.
For example, you can send an email when you move a card in a speific column, and this email will contain the title, the description, the assignees, and the sharing url of this card (see point 1)
Your partners do not need a Kantree account or license (paid for in the plan chosen by your company) for emails to be sent to them automatically.