User Types / Permissioning

[Sing Chen]

Hi, curious if Atlas has the concept of user types and/or permissioning levels.

By this I don't mean the concept of owner, contributor, and follower roles. I'm interested in whether there are classifications of user levels that have access to certain functions and others don't. For example, can every user create projects, topics, and goals?

We're piloting Atlas in a sandbox environment for our department and I'm turning my thoughts to governance and best practice. When we move to Production, if all employees have the ability to create projects, goals, and topics, I have concerns about how we "maintain order" and don't have a runaway train of goals created by different users in different departments that don't conform to any common standard or topics that don't follow a structured taxonomy and ending up with #project and #projects.

So I'm curious to know if user capabilities can be governed and managed within the system or if it needs to be driven by a disciplined business process.

[Mark · Accepted solution]

Hi Sing, thanks for the great question. Atlas doesn't currently have a permission model for access to projects and goals. We do give Admins more workspace settings, and users can set individual projects to be private, but right now that's it.

Obviously we do want to add some greater level of permissions as we continue to build out Atlas. I think we'd be hesitant about totally limiting users from creating projects (as we see Atlas as being more of a bottom-up view of the work being done) but it definitely makes sense to have stricter permissions for goal creation and editing.

It also sounds like providing templating would help meet your needs. If we let you define project and goal templates that you expected users to follow, that would ensure that work that gets tracked gets captured in consistent ways. 

Another feature we are working on is the ability to save specific views. So you could search for a set of goals that matters to you and then be able to share and view that set easily. This would mean that even if a lot of goals get created you'll always be able to access a focused view of the goals that matter.

For now however, you'd need to maintain order via business processes, and communicate how you want projects and goals to be tracked within Atlas.

Hopefully we will build out more of these features in the coming months.

[Sing Chen]

@Mark Thanks for the comprehensive response. I figured it would need to be business process rather than system managed but wanted to clarify I wasn't missing anything from the documentation.

Atlas is garnering a lot of internal interest and my preference would be to align on some foundational level of governance and standards so users can get the most from it before we have too many users on it without the guidance that they are likely looking for

I look forward to seeing how this develops and I'm always open to support any beta testing if the opportunity arises.

[Jack Ukleja]

Mark are there any updates on the permissions model? Right now its all too easy for people to accidentally make changes to other peoples items, archive them etc. And as Atlas has no audit log there is no way to know who even made the change.