Connect items in Private Board A to Shared Board B

Platform discussions Special workflows & use cases
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Hi!

I have all of our projects listed on Private Board A, and need to share subsets of these as view only on Shared Boards B, C, D, etc. belonging to different departments.

I set up an automation on Private Board A so that when we select the department from the status column, a new item matching that row is created on the appropriate Shared Board (B, or C, etc.). That part works well, and the department can then see only their projects.

Where I am running into trouble is trying to sync the boards so when we change a status on Private Board A that is reflected on the relevant Shared Board. I have been looking and experimenting with:

  • mirror columns – which can’t be viewed by the departments because they don’t have view permissions on Private Board A
  • match automations – which don’t seem to work (I could be setting these up incorrectly)
  • Connect boards – same issue as mirror columns.

It looks like the link to column option has been removed, and I have spent several hours trying to figure this out. I also haven’t had much luck in the forums here.

Any ideas? Any workarounds?

THANK YOU IN ADVANCE!! : )

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hi @FredBaker

Welcome back to the community! You are correct, a mirror from a shared board to a private board will not display the information in the shared board. It would go against any good security / privacy aspect as the private board is private for a reason :slight_smile:

I am curious which of the available match / lookup apps you have tested. I am convince this one https://monday.com/marketplace/129 works as long as:

  • the user that setup the automation has access to the private board
  • there is a unique key (Match) on both boards A and B

Have fun testing it.

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Thanks for the suggestion @basdebruin.

I need something native, so this paid app won’t work for me.

Any ideas for something built in?

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hi @FredBaker

I don’t think there is a native solution for this. I would be very surprised if monday allows to expose information on a private board to members of a shareable board.

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Gotcha. I can change it from private to shareable, but not sure that actually changes the situation much.

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@FredBaker did you find a solution for this issue, currently I am looking at downloading a mirrored file and re-uploading it to a different column so the user can see it, this is incredibly annoying especially across over 100 boards and multiple items per board :frowning:

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[quote=“basdebruin, post:2, topic:33704”]
It would go against any good security / privacy aspect as the private board is private for a reason
[/quote] this is a ridiculous position, if permissions can be locked, hidden or restricted at a column level why would it not be possible to transfer these restrictions or permissions to a mirrored column, using a third party app to ‘hack’ the permissions just makes the lack of functionality even more obvious

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@John-TA

With the help of Monday support, I got a functional solution for most of what I needed. The quick version is:

Connecting the Boards & Specific Items

On Board B, I set up a 2-way connection between Private Board A and Board B (I want this one to be view only for the client).

Then I set up an automation on Private Board A so that when I change status on Private Board A to X, it creates an item on Board B. This way, when I select the client on Private Board A, the project copies over to Board B. This connects the specific item from Private Board A to the item created on Board B. The part I was getting wrong was not setting up the connection first, so the specific items weren’t connecting automatically.

Updating the Statuses automatically

I set up mirror columns on Board B to reflect the statuses on Private Board A. When the status on Private Board A changes, the mirror column does as well, but, the client can’t see these because they don’t have permissions on Private Board A. So, I set up automations on Board B so that when the mirror column changes status, it changes the relevant status columns on Board B (the ones the client can see). The automation is something like: When a status changes to something, change another status to something.

I had around 7 columns, each with around 5 statuses, so this ended up being a lot of automations, but it works for statuses.

Check out Automate: Add new item in #1 GROUP A, automatically added to connected board #2 ITEM A - FAQs - monday Community for more info.

What doesn’t work

There isn’t currently a way to change dates on Board B using the mirror column that reflects the date on Private Board A. That means when we change a project due date on Private Board A, we also need to manually change it on Board B. Thankfully those don’t change much.

Hope this helps!

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Thanks for the reply @FredBaker I have a meeting with Monday.com this week, the biggest challenge I face right now is the copying/moving of files from a private board to a shared board, we needed to have a review step in the middle which basically went
 file is uploaded, file is reviewed/accepted by our team, file is mirrored/copied/moved to a shared board - hopefully I can get this to work :slight_smile:

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Gotcha.

Are you able to use links (to dropbox, etc.) instead of actual files? That may alleviate the issue

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Thanks, this solution is interesting, but if I need the client to be able to create elements on board B, it’s not possible right? (because the new items created on board B will not be linked to board A?)