Invite your team

Bringing someone in takes two steps, in two places, and knowing which is which saves a lot of confusion.

1. Put them in the organization. That happens at the Vibeforce account, because the organization is shared by every Vibeforce product.
2. Put them in workspaces. That happens in Openbook, in each workspace's settings, because workspaces are Openbook's business and nobody else's.

Step 1 — add them to the organization

1. In Openbook, open your organization and press Members & access at the top of its Home. That opens your organization's page at the account service, in a new tab.
2. Add the person's email address and choose their role: owner, admin, member, or viewer. Roles and permissions explains what each one means.

Everything about membership is decided there: adding and removing people, changing a role, transferring ownership, and re-sending an invitation that got lost. Openbook keeps no copy of the member list, so there is nothing to keep in sync and no second place for the answer to be wrong.

If they already have a Vibeforce account with that email, they are added straight away and your organization appears in their account. One account can belong to several organizations.

If they do not have an account yet, the invitation is held as pending until they register with that address, at which point they join your organization automatically.

Pending invitations match on the email address. If someone says they signed up but does not see your organization, the usual cause is that they registered with a different address than the one you invited. Check the pending list at the account service and invite the address they actually used.

Step 2 — add them to workspaces

Once someone is in the organization, they can already open every workspace whose visibility is Everyone. To give them a role inside a workspace — or to let them into one set to Certain people — add them to it.

Open the workspace's Settings → Community:

• Add Member — their email address and an access level: Full access (create and edit, manage members), Read only (view, can't edit), or Guest (one room only; see below).
• Bulk Invite — a CSV file with the columns Email (required), Role (admin, member or viewer) and Name (optional).
• Add everyone from the organization — adds every registered member of the organization who is not in the workspace yet.

A new workspace can do the last of these for you: the Create a workspace dialog has Add everyone in <organization> to this workspace, ticked by default.

Invitations to an address that has not registered wait under Pending Members until the person signs up.

Openbook's organization-wide "workspace access" form is gone. It used to sit on Openbook's own Members & access page, next to the link to the account. Workspace membership is set per workspace, here, instead.

Viewers are free

People with the viewer role — and guests — are always free and never count as billable seats. Openbook counts a seat as an organization member whose role is anything other than viewer.

That changes the calculus on who to invite: there is no cost reason to leave stakeholders out. Give executives, clients, and adjacent teams the viewer role so they can follow the work without pinging you for status.

Guests are narrower still

A guest is not a role. It is a flag on top of viewer-shaped permissions that scopes a person to the specific rooms you invite them to. You invite one from a workspace's Settings → Community, with Add Member → Guest and the room they should see; Manage rooms on their row adds and removes more.

A guest cannot see a room they were not explicitly added to, even a room whose visibility is set to everyone in the workspace. That is the difference between a guest and a viewer: a viewer can read the whole workspace, a guest can read the rooms on their list.

Two things to know before inviting one:

• A guest must already have an account. Guest scoping hangs off a real account, so if they have not signed up yet you are told to ask them to, and then invite them.
• Guest invitations are always read-only. Any permissions in the invitation are ignored and replaced with read access to the named rooms.

Giving a guest a normal workspace role later is the only way out of guest status, and it ends it completely.

Tips

• Invite early. Don't wait until the workspace is "ready". A workspace with real teammates in it fills up with real work; a workspace you're polishing alone stays a demo.
• Invite before people sign up. Pending invitations attach automatically at registration, so you can add your whole team's addresses in one sitting.
• Default to viewer. When in doubt about whether someone needs to write, start them read-only — it costs nothing and you can raise their role later.
• Mind what outsiders can see. Anyone in the organization can open every workspace visible to Everyone. For a client or contractor who should see only their own work, either invite them as a guest to the rooms they need, or keep your internal workspaces set to Certain people.

After they join

New members land in the organization with the role you chose at the account service. From there:

• They see the workspaces visible to everyone, plus the ones they were added to.
• Inside a workspace, their workspace role decides what they can change. A workspace's owner or an admin sets it from the workspace's Settings → Community, and the person is notified when it changes.

See Roles and permissions for what each role can do.