Organization Best Practices

There are a few ways Shade users have been configuring their Shade workspace and drives. Here are a few examples:

I’m an individual just getting started, but want to be able to share a few things with some people.

When you sign up with Shade you automatically get your own personal workspace. To keep your items separate from external projects, you would want to create at least 1 additional drive:

Brandon's Personal Workspace
├── Default Drive
└── Project 1

You can now invite team members to collaborate with you in your project drive, or invite guests at folder level. If you want to move or copy the files between the two drives, you can mount both drives to your desktop and use Finder for those operations. Learn more about mounting and ShadeFS at ShadeFS. If however, you know that these guests will need to access multiple drives and projects, it might be a good idea to create a team workspace and invite them as members.

I’m a production team and I have 10 clients, how should I organize my team and assets with Shade?

First, if you have not already, create a workspace for your team and invite your team members to that workspace. Your team members will inherit specific permission levels per drive based on your drive permission configuration (learn how here). We would not recommend adding your clients at the workspace level unless you believe they will access multiple drives.

External clients should be managed and handled as a guests in Shade (users invited below the workspace level). Guests allow you to explicitly provide specific types of access and control at the drive, folder, or file level. Depending on how you might work with your client, you might separate out their projects by folder and have drives specific to each client. Here are a few examples:

Shade Studios Workspace
├── Client 1 Drive
│   ├── Project 1 Folder
│   └── Project 2 Folder
├── Client 2 Drive
└── Client 3 Drive

Shade Studios Workspace
├── Client 1 Project A Drive
├── Client 1 Project B Drive
├── Client 2 Project A Drive
├── Client 2 Project B Drive
└── Client 2 Project C Drive

Another option is to invite your clients as workspace members and then restrict their default inheritance on drives to be None or View Only.

I’m a 100 person company, managing multiple projects, spanning from a variety of different departments and groups, how should I work with Shade?

There is a good chance that you will need to create multiple workspaces at this size. If you believe that to be the case, please reach out our team here so we can unify all the workspaces under a branded organization with billing configured at an organization level.

If you intend to work under one workspace, you will likely want to set up multiple drives per team:

Shade Studios Workspace
├── Team 1 Drive A
│   ├── 2024 Projects
│   └── 2025 Projects
├── Team 1 Drive B
│   ├── Video
│   └── Digital Media
├── Team 2 Drive A
...
├── Team 2 Drive Z
└── Team 3 Drive A

Many enterprise users also find it useful to create an Archived Assets drive which acts as the B-roll drive accessible by anyone in the workspace.

Next, enable SSO/SAML from the workspace settings:

[video]

Visit this page for more information on how to manage permissions.