Better sharing

[CobusT]

There is more work to be done around sharing and to make it more popular. It is a core part of what makes the platform so useful! This is true for how it works in the Free tier as well as the Teams (and Enterprise) tiers.

Some of the things we are evaluating are:

• Subteams - sharing inside a team with a subset of people
• Teams sharing externally - individual notebooks shared with outside collaborators (or clients)

There are lots of complexities to consider, for example:

• How do we make it clear to team members that a notebook is now not private anymore?
• When an externally shared notebook has access to Team databases, secrets, other notebooks (imports)… how will those work without exposing all of that private (unshared) information to the external collaborator?

[aaronkyle]

Plus one to adding sub-team support. I am working with more people on different sub-teams, and it's getting a bit cumbersome to add all the members of a team into the shared list of notebook viewers and editors. I would love it if i could add people into a sub-team group, then just add that group to a notebook.... inheriting all the default editor/viewer permissions assigned to members at the account level. Then, when looking at the team permissions, I'd like to see each authorized person and their specific permission level (so I can edit / adjust as desired).

[saneef]

Here's another one for @CobusT's list of complexities:

Imports are used a lot in my current team account. When I share a notebook with a team member, I usually forget to add them to the imported (dependencies), private notebooks.

I only realize the mistake when the person emails or messages me and says they cannot access it because it's showing an error.

It would be nice if Observable could let me know before granting access to a person (or worst case, after), that so-and-so imports won't be accessible to that person.

[CobusT]

Thanks for adding to this Saneef. That is an interesting one. I have not run into that personally, since I typically share my 'library' type notebooks with the team (so that they can use it also) and so when I then share another notebook using those functions, I don't typically run into this problem. But I can definitely see that it would be a useful warning.

[MaxHalford]

Hello there. I just wanted to share my interest for this topic. We make heavy use of Observable at our company. In particular, we like to prototype tools before implementing them in React. We like sharing these prototypes with our customers to get them excited and collect feedback.

Sharing an unlisted public link to our customers isn't ideal for privacy reasons. And we don't want to share all our stuff with them. We only want to share a particular notebook, and only the notebook, not the database connections. Our current solution is to create a separate account for each one of our customers, but that's annoying. Plus it means we have to create separate database schemas for each one of our customers.

[CobusT]

Thanks for sharing. External collaboration (notebook level) is very high on our list.

Could you expand a bit on what you meant by creating different database schemas for each client? You mention earlier that the notebooks you share with them don't need database access so I want to make sure I understand your workflow. Happy to set up time to discuss in person also. Please reach out to [email protected] if you would rather discuss privately)

[MaxHalford]

Sorry, I wasn't clear. The notebooks we share definitely need database access. But we don't want to give our clients potential access to the entire database connection. In fact, we'd just like to share a static view of the notebook where the database connection has been turned off, and the necessary data has already been retrieved. Does that make sense? If not I'm happy to discuss in person, hit me up on [email protected].

[CobusT]

Ahhh, that is more complicated, Max. It touches on a more elaborate feature which is to be able to snapshot data (discussed here)

If we enable external collaborators to a notebook in a team, we will have to protect the general team assets (other notebooks, databases, secrets). For this workflow, it would probably be best to snapshot the data and attach it to the notebook before sharing with the external collaborator (in the future world where we have the external sharing feature).

[kgeis]

It's great to hear that you are working on this. Observable is not an option for my university department without more granular permissions, as well as allowing external access to specific databases.

I would like to be able to create a database that is either a subteam asset or can be shared with a subteam.