Who sees what: customizing permissions and privacy settings in Teamwork Projects

We built Teamwork Projects to help you and your team be more productive, and we love hearing about how you use our software to Get Things Done. (We really do!) That’s why we’re bringing you this blog series: to highlight some of our hardest-working features that you might not have heard about yet, and let you know how they can work for you and your team. Today’s topic: How to customize your Teamwork Projects permissions and privacy settings to fit your needs, from site level all the way down to a simple task. Depending on the company, team, or project, there are almost always instances where you’ll need to lock down a specific project, task list, file or message for viewing only by a certain group of people. Maybe you’re working with sensitive information or confidential updates that can’t be shared across the team or company. For times like these, we’ve got your back. Teamwork Projects has some of the most granular and customizable permission settings of any collaboration and work management software, so there’s lots you can do! Here’s how you can customize both permissions and privacy settings throughout Teamwork Projects so you know exactly who sees what. Psst! Looking for a quick cheat sheet on all of the different user types, in an easy-to-digest table form? Add this to your bookmarks.

Setting default permissions for new users

Teamwork Projects is transparent by design, meaning our default permission settings give new users visibility over an entire project as well as the ability to modify and update project items. But it’s really easy to set your own default permissions for new users in Teamwork Projects. Here’s how: First, go to the top right of your profile and choose the “Settings” option. (You need to be the site owner or admin to do this bit.) Then, select the “Templates” option and scroll to “New User on Project” at the end of the page. From here, you can set different default permissions for users in the owner company, external companies, and collaborators. You can control permissions on things like updating milestones, task lists, tasks, messages, notebooks, and links. You can also customize what new users see: for example, other users’ logged time, project updates, messages, and files.

Setting user permissions on a project

Certain projects require a bit more privacy than others, so user permissions can also be customized at a project level. If you’re a site owner, admin, or project admin, you can customize user permissions at a project level. This means you can tailor what each user on a project can modify and view. To do this, go to the “People” section of your project, hover over the user whose permissions you’d like to modify, and select “Edit Project Permissions.”  Now you can customize their settings to suit your requirements, from setting task and milestones permissions to accessing messages and files.

If you want to make sure you haven’t missed anything, you can impersonate the user whose permissions you’re modifying to double-check that they have access to everything they should be seeing (and nothing that they shouldn’t). Here’s a really handy breakdown of default permissions and access for users and collaborators so you can better understand who can see what from the get-go.  

Setting privacy on a task list

Sometimes, you might only need to restrict access to a specific task list within a project. No problem: it’s simple to set privacy on a task list so that it’s locked down for viewing only by a certain set of people. To do this, click the drop-down arrow next to your task list name, select “Edit Task List,” and then select the “Privacy” tab. From here, you can set the privacy to a specific company or to a certain group of people. Just be aware, you cannot block owner company site admins from any task lists; that means that they can always see everything, in any project, on the site that they’re an admin for. Once set, you’ll see a little lock next to the task list name. When you hover over this, you can see exactly who can view the task list. All tasks that are part of the task list inherit this privacy setting, so are also locked down for viewing by your selected group of people — so you don’t need to worry about the confidentiality of new tasks that you add.

Privacy can be set on all project features, like milestones, messages, files, links, tasks, and notebooks.  As always, if you have any questions on setting up user permissions or adjusting privacy settings, just email us at support@teamwork.com and we’ll be happy to help. We’d love to hear what you think. How do you use the privacy settings in Teamwork Projects? (If it’s too private to tell us, we understand.) What other features would you like to see us cover in this series? Let us know in the comments.