Guests vs Workspace Members

What's the difference between a guest and a workspace, and when to use

Understanding the Difference Between Guests and Workspace Members

In Shade, there are two core types of user types: "Workspace Admins & Members", and "Guests". Here is the breakdown.

Workspace Admins and Members

Workspace admins and members (collectively internal members) are individuals within your organization who collaborate in your workspace. These are your paid seats that have the full ability to do everything in Shade, including mount drives, manage and create custom metadata, tag assets, access multiple drives, manage facial recognition and more.

Worksapce members are paid seats who have the most access to Shade's features

Internal members are typically restricted to your company domain and can be set up properly with Enterprise SSO/SAML/SCIM and any other Active Directory Syncing system for JIT and account provisioning.

Permissions are still in play. This means that if you restrict all workspace members to have "view only" access to a drive by default, they will only be able to view assets, and not mount / edit metadata etc.

Key Notes of Workspace Members:

• Paid Seats: Membership within a workspace requires a paid account, ensuring access to premium features and collaborative tools.

• Mounting Capabilities: Exclusive to internal members, mounting enables the integration and synchronization of various applications and data sources directly within the workspace.

• Custom Attributes and Views: Internal members can manage Shade views and custom metadata for the entire organization across drives.

Enterprise SSO/SAML + SCIM

Provisioning of accounts and SSO/SAML enforcement will be required for internal members only if enabled for your workspace. All seats provisioned via SCIM will be considered a paid seat (as they are internal members).

Guests

Guests, on the other hand, facilitate external collaboration without full membership to your organization's workspace. They serve as external partners, clients, or collaborators who have limited access. Typically, you will share an individual file or folder with a guest.

Guests can be tracked in your Workspace > Manage Members > Guests

Guests can be tracked in the same spot as Members. However, you do not pay for guests. Guests can easily be upgraded to members as needed.

Guests do not count towards your seat limit and do not count as a paid member seat. We often see internal stakeholders (such as the head of marketing, CEO, COO) and those that are not actively using Shade on a regular basis be guests in Shade.

Share links and collections links are another way to share files in Shade, these bypass requiring users to create a Shade account in the first place, saving time and effort to onboard everyone into Shade.

Key Features of Guests:

• Shared Access: Guests can access specific files and folders shared with them but are not granted blanket access to the entire workspace.

• Account Association: Guests have Shade accounts that are linked to your workspace for identification but do not occupy a seat.

• Cost-Effective Collaboration: Since guests do not occupy paid seats, they allow for budget-friendly collaboration with external parties.

• Guests can upload files too. Simply share a folder with a guest or by sharing a public link with upload access.

• Guests cannot mount drives. You must be an internal workspace member (paid seat) to mount drives.

Guests cannot mount drives. You must be an internal workspace member (paid seat) to mount drives.

In summary, while internal members are designed for internal, full-access collaboration with paid membership, guests offer a flexible and cost-effective means to involve external collaborators without compromising on security or resource allocations. Understanding these differences ensures optimal resource utilization and secure workflow management in your organization.

Alternative to Guests - Link Sharing / Collection Links

It is oftentimes easier to simply share files with external collaborators using links and public sharing. Links can be created on the file, folder, or even collection level to ensure that people can access, download, upload, and even comment and edit metadata fields that are enabled for the link.

Links also offer expiring access, password protection and more. Check out more about links here.