Sharing Designs

Share design with other users and use control access to manage design access permissions and visibility.
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Who can use this feature

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Overview

In Kanvas, you can share your designs or designs for which you have permission to share with other members of your organization and teams, and you can control access permissions. This page describes the different access types for designs and how to effectively use them.

Visibility

Designs and Views have visibility statuses that define who can access your designs. These options offer different levels of exposure for your designs:

  • Private: Designs or Views with visibility status private defines only you, the creator, and the user or team that have access based on granted access permission can view and edit the design. Other users cannot access it unless you explicitly share it with them.

  • Public: Making a design public allows anyone within your organization to view, comment on, and edit the design. This feature is useful for sharing best practices, reference architectures, or contributions within your organization. However, as the owner of the design, you can restrict permissions for individual users or teams by adding and customizing access permissions. We will discuss how you can do this in the next section.

  • Published: The published visibility setting is designed for sharing designs with a wider audience. Published designs become discoverable to other Meshery users and allows them to view, download and clone the design. Users can find published designs through Meshery Catalog and catalog tab within Kanvas.

Granting access for Individual Users

As a design owner, you have granular control over access permissions for your designs.

Following steps shows how you can grant access to individual users:

  • Open your design in Kanvas.
  • Click the “Share” button located on top right corner.
  • Enter the name or email addresses of the users you want to share the design with.
  • Define the access type for each user (e.g., view, comment, edit). You can choose from predefined options.

You can also change visibility status between public and private of design from here.

Access types and their Impact:

In share modal, you have different access types that you can assign to users or teams for your designs.

  • View: Users with view access can see the design details but cannot modify them.
  • Comment: Comment access allows users to add comments and suggestions to the design, facilitating discussions and feedback.
  • Edit: Edit access allows users to modify configurations, add components, deploy design, and essentially alter the design. While Editors have extensive access, they do not have all the privileges of the Owner like deleting designs.
  • Owner: Owner access grants the highest level of permission, includes all access types available like view, comment and edit. Owners have full control over the design and its settings. However, it’s important to note that presently Kanvas does not support transferring the design ownership.

The Owner, Editor, and Viewer access types are hierarchical, meaning that the Owner access includes the edit access, and the Edit access includes the view access.

If there are explicit access type set for a user, that will take precedence and be considered active. Otherwise, the access type assigned to the team will be used if the user is part of team and team has access.

For example, if Sarah has been granted specific access type, that will be active. However, if no specific access permission are set for Sarah, but she’s part of a team with access, then the access type of that team will apply to her.

Revoking, and Re-inviting Access:

You can manage access permissions at any time by revisiting the “Share” modal. This modal allows you to grant access to new users, revoke access or even update the access permissions of current users.

You can share your design via link, for that revisit the “Share” modal and click on “Copy Link” button. You will be allowed to share the link only if your design’s visibility status is public, anyone who click the link or you share with can be able to access your design. It’s important to understand that currently making design public allows users to view, comment and edit the design.

This can be useful when you want to share design with multiple users without explicitly giving the access.

Granting access for Teams (Upcoming feature)

In an upcoming feature, Kanvas will introduce the ability to grant access to entire teams, simplify the process of collaboration and sharing within your organization. This feature will offer a convenient way to manage permissions for groups of users who are working together on projects or tasks.

With this new capability, you’ll be able to designate specific teams within your organization and grant them access to designs. Instead of individually assigning permissions to each member, you can simply assign permissions to the team as a whole, and manage access permission like view, comment and edit for team.

Understanding the Implications of adding a Design to a Workspace:

When you add design to a workspace, it signifies that all teams associated with that workspace will be allowed to access your designs even if it is private, however you can update the access type of team by revisiting the “Share” modal within Kanvas.

Learn more about auditing the access permission within workspace

Last modified September 13, 2024: rm kanvas alias (987e685)

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