Work with external partners

There are several ways to work with people outside your organization: partners, suppliers, customers… You can combine them. They are listed below from the most limited access to the widest.

Share a link to a view or to a card: hover the view in the sidebar (or open the card), click …, then Share this view (or Share for a card). Anyone with the link can see the view or the card, but cannot change it.

With a view, they can open all the cards of the view and see their content.
With a card, they see all its content.

Sharing options of a view:

Only show comments visible in form requests: the shared view shows only the comments sent with Show in request. For example, for job applications: in the same card, you answer the candidate and you talk with your colleagues, but the candidate only sees the answers. See Forms.
In cards, only show fields selected in view settings: the cards show only the fields chosen in the Displayed fields of the Appearance menu.

Good to know:

Your partners do not need a Kantree account, and they do not use a license.
They have no home page with the links that you shared: they must keep the links themselves.
Embed gives the code to show the view in a website.
Click Unshare to stop sharing: the link no longer works.

Invite them to your workspace

Invite your partners as guests of a workspace: click the pictures of the members at the top right, then Manage Workspace members, then Add members, and enter their email address. See Add members.

As members of the workspace, they can see all its cards and its public views. Choose their role to limit what they can do, for example Observer (read only) or Observer allowed to comment.

To give them access to only a part of the workspace, use custom roles: choose which fields they can change, and which views they can see. See Permissions on views, fields and groups.

Your partners must create a Kantree account. They then see the workspace on their home page.

On kantree.io (Team and Business plans), guests with the Observer role do not use a license.

On a dedicated Kantree installation (Enterprise), guests use a license, unless your administrator gives them the "Unlicensed" status. They can then only view the workspaces: they cannot be assigned to cards or comment.

Invite them as contractors of your organization

On kantree.io, you can invite your partners to the organization with the Contractor role. You can then add them to any workspace, with any role.

Contractors see the workspaces that they are added to on their home page. They do not see the page of the organization, and they cannot join workspaces by themselves: you add them to each workspace.

Contractors use a license.

Other ways

A public form lets your partners send you information without a Kantree account. Each answer creates:

a card in your workspace, with the answers in its fields,
a request page for your partner, if you turned it on. On this page, they follow their request, and they can change their answers or add comments, if you allow it.

To answer them, write a comment on the card with Show in request: they get an email. They only see their own requests, unless you also share a view with them.

See the Forms guide.

Send emails automatically

Automations can send emails, for example when a card moves to a column. The email can contain the information of the card: its title (${card:title}), its fields, its share link…

Create an email template: open the settings of the workspace, then Emailing, then Add email template. Write the email, with variables for the information of the card.
In an automation, add the Send email action, choose the template and enter the email address of your partner.

The email templates of a workspace

Your partners do not need a Kantree account to receive these emails. See Automations.