Understanding Privacy & Permissions in Opal

Lee Dussinger Updated by Lee Dussinger

Marketing and comms organizations often do work that must be kept private until ready to be shared. However, this work often requires a degree of collaboration to be completed. That is why Opal employs a robust system of privacy and permissions to ensure your work is as private as needed, while being able to be shared with key people.

Spaces and objects in Opal have two privacy settings:

Invite Only: This is the most restrictive setting. When selected, the item is private and only visible to the users and groups you explicitly add to the Collaborators list. A lock icon next to the item's title indicates it is set to "Invite Only."

Public: This setting makes the item visible to everyone in your Opal workspace. It’s ideal for resources, guidelines, or finalized campaign assets that the entire organization can see.

Objects like Moments, Boards, and Plans automatically inherit the privacy settings of the container they live in. However, this inheritance can be overridden at any level, giving you the flexibility to open up specific parts of a project for broader collaboration without exposing the entire strategy.

When looking to change the permissions on any object, you can select individuals or groups. In addition, that privacy modal also indicates the associations with stories and whether access is granted to that association.

Primary Benefits of Privacy & Permissions

Enhanced Security: Keep confidential information, such as budgets, unannounced product details, and strategic pivots, accessible only to authorized team members.

Simplified Collaboration: Easily grant access to specific teams, user groups, or individuals for targeted collaboration without over-sharing.

Clear Visibility: At a glance, understand who has access to any given Plan, Moment, Board, or piece of content.

Common Scenarios that Require Unique Permission Structures

The Privacy & Permissions system is flexible enough to allow for unique situations where information needs to be protected while giving necessary access.

Managing an Agency Partner - Many Opal users want to limit their agency's visibility to just the content they need to develop. In this case, the Opal user will set the entire campaign as private and only invite the agency group or users into specific moments that need their work. In this case, the agency will be able to work on all of their content in Opal and communicate with the team - however, the specifics of the campaign and the other content will be completely hidden. In addition, depending on the setup, the agency users have the ability keep work private until it is finished and ready to be presented to their client.

Keeping Key Campaign Info Confidential - For some Opal customers, the specific choices they make are big news, and thus, some of their content is kept private to a very small set of internal employees. This can often be the case where product names, specifics or other identifying information is limited to a need-to-know group. While the specifics of the campaign may not be available to the org as a whole, they still need to put the campaign together. To accomplish this, the entire campaign is set public while the individual moments are only available to a select group.

Exec Comms - When managing executive comms, the executive team often maintains content moments with the specifics of what they want to say. While the plans and moments are private, the exec team will often grant temporary access to a writer (or a group) to produce the work.

Regional Content Management - Another unique use of permissions in Opal involves managing content for a brand with numerous regions. In some cases, a regional team will make their plans, boards and moments private - while giving access to everyone who works in that region. However, once the campaign has been finished, the regional team will set everything to public. This enables other regional or even global teams to see and re-use content if they so choose.

How did we do?

Previous | Next

Contact