Collaboration between two members on the same card without sharing a complete table

Question

Hello,

I'm part of a small team using Trello to manage our firm's internal projects. We use the free version of Trello and have set up a structure with one table for each business area (HR, Communications, Administration, etc.) so that each member of staff has access only to their own area.

However, some projects require occasional collaboration between two people belonging to different boards. We would like to know if it is possible, in the free version :

- Share a specific card with two members without both of them being members of the whole board?

- And more specifically: add a collaborator to a card on a private board, without adding them as a full member of the board, or making them the administrator of the space (which seems to be compulsory in the free version)?

Our aim is to:

- Keep each board separate

- Avoid making all members administrators of the space

- Enable targeted, secure and fluid collaboration on certain boards.

Thank you in advance for your feedback, or for any viable alternative for the free version.

Yours sincerely,
Ebru CIHAN

Alina Kurishko · Answer

Hi Ebru,

Welcome to the Atlassian Community! 🙂

I see where you're coming from, but I'm afraid it's not currently possible (whether on a free or paid Trello plan) to share only particular cards on a board with someone and keep other cards hidden. But we do have a feature request open for this, so I've added this community post as a "+1" in favor of implementing such changes. Here it is: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/TRELLO-98

You can visit this suggestion, log in with your Atlassian account, and click Start watching this issue on the right panel. This will help our product and engineering team understand more about which functionalities our users are interested in. Also, when the ticket is updated by our product team, you'll be notified via email!

I'd also like to add one small note. You're right that every member in a free Workspace is automatically its admin. However, when we're talking about private boards, only board members (and admins) can view the board itself. Other Workspace members who haven't been specifically invited to a private board won't be able to review its content.

The only suggestion I can think of is to create a separate board, move the card you want users from different teams to collaborate on to that board, invite people to the board, and when the work on the card is done, move it back to the original board. I understand it's not quite feasible if you have multiple cards across various boards that need input across teams, and it'll create much effort to keep track of such cards, but hope it introduces some workaround for your and your team.

Hope this information helps!

Alina | The Trello Team

Lipakshi Narang · Answer

Hi Ebru,

Thank you for reaching out to the community!

Currently, we don't offer sharing just a card with a user without making them member of the board. This is not just with free Trello. It is the same behavior across all the subscriptions.

You can add a user as a guest to a board which will add them only to the specific board without adding them to the entire workspace.

You can learn more about guests here: What is a Workspace guest?

Kind regards,
Lipakshi
Trello Team