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Workspaces

Team roles

Team members often specialize in different tasks, so when you create a team, you as the team owner can define team roles.

  • Viewer: The person who needs to read, search, and comment on team notebooks.
    • Guest Viewer: The person who needs to read, search, and comment on team notebooks explicitly shared with them.
  • Editor: The person who needs to create or edit notebooks, decide whether notebooks should be public, make suggestions, or delete notebooks and collections.
    • Guest Editor: The person who needs to edit notebooks explicitly shared with them. Guests are not able to create new notebooks, fork or suggest notebooks, or update the sharing for other members on a notebook.
  • Owner: The person sharing team ownership. Owners can invite new members, assign roles, empty the trash, and manage team settings.

Anyone you invite can join the team using their existing Observable accounts, or they can create new accounts.

Some teams (classrooms, journalism teams, or our internal ObservableHQ team) have mostly editors, while others (such as Enterprise teams) have some editors and a larger group of viewers. Guest editors and viewers are used to collaborate on specific notebooks without sharing the entire workspace. A team owner can configure the team in any combination of roles.

Access levels

Newly created notebooks will default to being visible only to you (the creator), and will appear in the team's notebook listings and search results only for you, and not for any other team members. (This is a configurable setting; if you wish, the team owner can go into Settings and make the default for newly-created notebooks to be visible for all team members.)

When you share your notebook with the team or a subset of the team (as viewers or editors) they will also see the notebook listed. Any team member with edit access may change the sharing settings for the notebook. Only a team owner can change another team member’s role for the notebook.

Note

This feature does not enable team members who are set up as viewers in the team to edit the notebooks. They will still only be able to view and provide comments.

Screenshot of the Share dialog showing the editing permissions dropdown with options Can view or edit, Can view, and No access.
Notebooks can be shared with the entire team or with individual team members.

Switch workspaces

Team members can switch between their individual workspaces and the team's workspace without needing to log into different accounts.

Screenshot of the workspaces drop-down in the top right of a notebook
You can easily switch between an individual workspace and a team workspace.