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Enhancing Collaboration with Access

We’ve heard from many teams using Opal, especially internal creative and agency teams, the need to iterate and collaborate on work in private prior to exposing their work to the broader team. We found many of these teams leveraging multiple systems - one for creating their work (in private) and one for sharing their work with the rest of their team. In many ways this is an obstacle to working effectively, leading to our latest release and solution that is Access.

Permissions Don't Account for Workflow

Traditional user permission systems don't solve for this problem as permissions are generally binary and unlikely to change per the evolving needs of a team’s workflow. This leads to systems that lock down spaces and work, ultimately inhibiting collaboration and the work from being completed.

Sometimes you need a space to noodle on a draft by yourself, or with just a few members of a team. Sometimes you need a space to work on a piece of content in a smaller group before revealing it to a larger team or a client. And sometimes a project is so sensitive that it needs to be kept quiet until it's ready to launch. In other words, collaboration comes in a variety of shapes, sizes and flavors. And you need a platform that's adaptable to those different modes.

Today we’re releasing Access; an evolution of how we’ve approached governance in Opal, and an enhancement to how you and your teams can collaborate.

Our Solution: Access

Access is a new capability in Opal that enhances collaboration by giving teams the ability to manage and change user access to spaces within the StoryFirst Framework.

Opal facilitates collaboration where it’s closely tied to a team’s workflow and is intended to regularly change states as various team members move in and out of the process. Access can be applied to stories, moments, and content, and the changing states of access extend to any chat and activity, assets, etc. associated with those stories, moments, and content.

Access also allows for a culture of self-governance, further encouraging collaboration. Without a centralized system of permissions management, users can request, approve, or deny access to a space or piece of content. This allows work to move forward without interruption. By leaving the management of Access in the hands of Opal users, we maintain our belief in keeping visibility, alignment, and efficiency at the core of Opal's value to teams.

States of Access

Every story, moment and content can now have three states of access:

1. Public: A space that anyone in your Opal Workspace can access.

2. Private: A space that only a specified set of users can access.

3. Private limited: A moment or content space that is accessible to a narrowed set of users than the private space “above” it

Changing States of Access

Access was designed to be dynamic. A piece of content can change from public to private to private limited, and back to public again. That means people can work as publicly or privately as they need over the course of a project and be confident that all of their conversations and decisions along the way are available only to the users that were part of that private mode. This is the power of changing states, especially when “client-ready” work is waiting to be revealed.

Extended across everything

Workflow across teams is often fluid. Assets, for instance, live at the workspace level and are available for use across all teams. When assets are part of a story that needs a certain level of discretion, it’s important to keep those assets private as well. Assets uploaded within a private space remain private in the Asset Library until the access of the space is changed.

There are many unique use-cases that Access solves for, from the challenge of managing sensitive brand content to creative teams that need a way to reveal their work within Opal.

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