Guest versus Subscriber versus Member Confusion

I’m befuddled by the user access.

The intention is to have Workspace Boards for employees to work on tasks, and to have Dashboards for clients to view progress as reflected from the Workspace Boards through widgets/ apps.

I have two email addresses. One is my work email address which is what I use to build the PM systems in Monday.com. It is my primary address. The other is my private email address which I am using to test access that clients will have to their dashboards.

After the Dashboard was ready to test, I went up to the “Share” button in the upper right hand corner. My private email did not show up so I figured maybe I needed to invite Client Me (private email) first.
I used the “Invite New Members” button on the left hand control panel. It allowed me to send an invite to Client Me.

When I checked my email, I clicked on the link and it took me to the login. But it wouldn’t allow me to log in, so I tried resetting my password. Then it told me it was associated with the free test account I had prior to the current actual company account.
So I logged in and couldn’t even tell you at this point what I did to switch it over to the other account but that seemed unnecessary.

So now I can log into the current company account. However now I can see all the Workspace Boards. I don’t want clients to see those. I’m assuming I have to change them to shareable?

In any case I then went back into the Dashboard under my primary admin account and shared the Dashboard with Client Me. Again I checked my email, selected the link, and logged in.

No Dashboard, only the Workspace Boards.

This is really confusing and I need to understand this before the end of the week so that when I start sending real emails with links to our clients, they won’t see the wrong things.

Hi @TyeZ

Hard to tell what you exactly are experiencing here. In your admin area there is a users section and you can select your view in a simple dropdown (activated guests / activated members). I think the most important one to check first is whether your private email shows up as member or guest.

The basic difference is that members do have access (by default) to all your main (company) boards and guest have only access to shareable boards where they are invited too. FYI: private boards can also be shared but only with members. When you invited yourself (with your private email) did you invite yourself as member or guest. If it was as member you will always be a member when you log in using that email address. You can however change a member to a gust in the users admin area.

Subscribers is not a role in monday.com, you can subscribe members and guest (from standard plan upwards). Maybe that is the confusion? :slight_smile:

Dashboards behave like shareable boards and you can invite both guests and members. Personally I always have my clients setup as guests, also because (on a Pro plan) guest do not count against your licensed users.

Hope this helps a bit.

Thank you for the insight into where I can look at a users type. That will help immensely. It had my private email set up as viewer, which I’m not too familiar with. I guess inviting someone through the left side tool panel will do that.

I have now changed my private email status to Guest. This has removed the Workspace Boards I do not want guests to see which is good. My problem now is that my private email guest self cannot see the Dashboard I invited myself to.
On a mobile device nothing shows up at all for Guest Self, but on a desktop the Dashboard shows in the listing, however clicking on it gives me a space with two lock icons saying that there is some secret information here and to ask for access.

Now I need to figure out why I’m getting that message. Do I need to check permissions somewhere?

Hmm… never had that one. Did you use the “Share” button in the upper right corner of the dashboard? There are options to “invite to a dashboard” which gives view only access to people who are not member or guests. And there is an option “subscribers and guest” which give you view and add option to add either members or guests
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A little confusing :slight_smile: indeed.

I did invite my private email through the share option that you show. I did it through the “Invite to this Dashboard” option.

I did find that I could see the Dashboard if I added my guest self to the Workspace Board, but then guests are privy to information I obviously don’t want them to see so it defeats the purpose.

I did not fully test this, but I think this is because the boards you use in your dashboard are not shared to the world (and therefore “Secret”) for an user (view only) you invited with this method.

If you don’t want the user to view data on your boards they should obviously not see that same data through a dashboard. Are you using shareable boards or main boards in your dashboard?

I’ve changed it a few times between Shareable and Main to test it out. When it is shareable I can of course add my Guest, and then the Workspace Board becomes visible as does the Dashboard. When changed to Main the guest is removed from the Workspace Board and the Dashboard no longer is available.

The Dashboard at current has two widgets, one of which is the Calendar, and the other is the Battery. It should be determined by the admin which data the guest can see, right?

I don’t want them seeing the Workspace Board because there is a lot of extra data that is meant for the staff, which is why the Dashboard should be showing the data I want pulled from the Workspace Board specifically for the client to see. If I can’t specify that and customize the permissions for what is pulled to view for the guest it completely defeats the purpose of even having an account with Monday.

I have emailed support about this to figure out what I need to do but this seems overly convoluted for a company that wants to make things relatively straight forward and easy to use.

OK, understood. It makes sense that external (view) users can’t see dashboard that contains Main boards as they do not have access to those Main boards. If you make the boards Shareable and invite guest by the same email as you invite them to dashboard, they will be able to view the dashboard. Take care, from a dashboard view you can easily select the underlying board(s) and display details.

I don’t see how to achieve what you want, dashboards are not build to hide information from specific users (I guess). What you could try is to create a view of your boards that exclude the “Secret” data, and share that view with the external users with a link. That certainly works for the board view(s) but I am not sure how that works out for a dashboard.

Support has essentially told me the same thing.

Honestly this should have been a straight forward function.

  1. Create Workspace Board

  2. Create Dashboard

  3. Select widgets to pull specific data from workspace board.

  4. Share dashboard with guest

  5. System should recognize that specific data pulled into the dashboard should automatically be transferred to shareable information with guests.

I cannot understand how this is not possible.

They offered the suggestion that I create a duplicate board which has all the sensitive information removed so it can be linked to the dashboard for them to view.
This is not a sufficient solution as it doubles the boards I would have (and we have a lot of clients), it would take a lot of manual operation on my part on a weekly basis, and make viewing information more confusing for the client as they would be able to access both boards.

I am in disbelief that it took this much work to find out our entire goal with Monday.com won’t be realized.

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Sorry to hear that. The approach they took with dashboards is that they are “live and interactive”. That means that from a dashboard you can drill down and modify underlying data. That is a wonderful approach for a lot of users (including myself) but it might be not the best approach for others. Especially if you want to use dashboards to hide information. I think it has to do that monday is more about sharing info than hiding info :slight_smile:

As an alternative you could use some of my app features that report data from detailed boards to a master board but this will also require an additional board.

I appreciate the suggestion but that would involve far more work than I have time available on a weekly basis.

From my perspective this wouldn’t be about hiding info, but sharing customized info.

I’ll keep looking for other work arounds but I really don’t want to have to cancel my plan and start researching all over again.