Be My Guest: External TeamLab Office Users with Restricted Rights

Hello everybody!

The topic of today’s post will be interesting for the majority of you judging by the amount of votes the idea of adding external users, i.e. guests, got – they are over 300! This great suggestion was implemented in TeamLab Office 7.4. Reading this post you will learn who the guests may be, what rights they have at your portal, how you can add and manage them, how much each guest will cost you, etc. So let’s start.

Who are they, these guests? Probably some of your clients would like to know about every slight change in their order fulfillment, or you have freelancers who work for your organization and need to access the project they are working at, or you often need to discuss shipping terms with your subcontractors… The solution is easy – you can invite your clients, freelancers, subcontractors as guests to your portal. It won’t cost you a penny! Just add so many guests as you need and don’t care about the costs! The guests won’t be taken into consideration while calculating the number of portal users.

How to add guests to the portal? To add a guest to your portal, just follow the steps below:
1. Open the ‘People’ module selecting it from the list in the left upper corner.
2. Click the ‘Create New’ button and select the ‘Guest’ option.
3. The ‘Create New Guest’ form will open where you need to fill in some fields. The following three of them are obligatory:

• First Name – enter the guest’s first name
• Last Name – enter the guest’s last name
• Email – enter the email address where the invitation letter will be sent to

The next fields can be left unfilled if you don’t have this information at your disposal. It can be provided by the guest himself/herself later. So the fields are:

• Group – click the ‘Add Group’ link, then the ‘Select’ link to open the list of available groups and choose one or several of them.

To add a guest to the created group, find him/her in the list, click the icon and select the 'Edit' option. On the guest's profile page click the 'Add Group' link and select the needed group from the list. As simple as that!


• Title – enter the guest’s position or role in your organization
• Sex – select between male and female
• Registration Date – the current date is selected by default, but you can select another one in the calendar that appears after you click within this field
• Date of Birth – enter the guest’s date of birth manually using the keyboard or select it in the calendar that appears after you click within this field
• Location – enter the guest’s location
• Comments – here you can leave a comment
• Contact Information – click the ‘Add new contact’ link, select the contact data type clicking the default ‘Email’ value and enter the data into the field. In the same way you can add further contact details
• Social Profiles – click the ‘Add new social profile’ link, select the social network clicking the default ‘Facebook’ option and enter the guest’s account name into the field

4. Click the ‘Save’ button.

After that the added person will receive an email with the link that he/she should follow to assign a password and join the portal. Then the guest gets the ‘G’ symbol at his/her avatar photo.

You can also save your time and add guests all at once. To do that,

1. Open the ‘People’ module.
2. Click the button in the left upper corner and select the ‘Import Accounts’ option.
3. Select the source you want to import guests from – Google, Yahoo, Windows Live, From File.
4. Mark the people you want to add to the portal.
5. Check the ‘Add users as guests’ box.
6. Click the ‘Add Selected’ button.

Note: you can also add users as guests while importing data from Basecamp within the 'Projects' module or inviting them via invitation link. For further information on adding guests please refer to this user guide.

What access rights do the guests have? By default all guests get access to the ‘Documents’, ‘Projects’ and ‘Community’ modules as well as to the ‘Calendar’, ‘Chat’ and ‘Feed’ tools. They have the following rights within these modules:

Note:
1. The guests don't have access to the 'CRM' and 'People' modules as well as the 'Payments' page.
2. In the 'Feed' tool and while using search, the guests can view only results they have access to.



Note: you can't give administrator rights to a guest.

If you need to restrict the guests’ access to a certain module,

1. Switch to the portal settings selecting the ‘Settings’ option from the list in the left upper corner.
2. Open the ‘Access Rights’ section clicking this option on the left-side panel.
3. Scroll down the page till the needed module.
4. Find the ‘Access to module is given to’ caption and check the ‘Users from list’ option. If this option is already checked, just proceed to the next step.
5. Click the ‘Add User’ link to restrict a certain guest’s rights or the ‘Add Group’ to restrict rights of a certain group of guests.
6. Select all the users or groups of users with the exception of the guest or group of guests whose rights you want to restrict.

After that the guests or groups of guests you didn’t include into the list won’t be able to access a certain module at all.

If the added guest has not enough access rights, you can change his/her type from guest to user. To do that,

1. Find the needed guest in the list within the ‘People’ module.
2. Check the box next to him/her.
3. Click the ‘Change Type’ button above the list and select the ‘User’ type.

Note: you can also change the portal member's type on his/her profile page.

After this procedure a guest will become a common portal user. It’s only possible if the number of users allowed by your pricing plan isn’t exceeded.

That’s all for today! In case you have questions, feel free to leave a comment here or write to our support staff. If you have valuable ideas on how to improve TeamLab Office, please add them to our special feedback page.