If you have been using OnePlace in a team environment, hopefully you have been enjoying its collaborative features to cut down on the number of face-to-face meetings required to talk about status and to find out where everyone is at with their assignments. In an earlier article on this blog, we talked about the power of the Discussions feature and how it helps your team stay out of the conference room, and stay on track.

But what you may not have discovered yet, is that OnePlace is also a great way to communicate and collaborate with people outside your team, such as a business partner, a client, a vendor, etc. In this article, I'll talk about how easy it is within OnePlace to add external users and give them visibility to your team's data.

To begin with, it's important to understand that all collaboration happens within workplaces. It's where you hold discussions, plan projects, assign work and share files among other things. A workplace can have as many members as you like, and there's no requirement that the members all belong to the same team. So, you can add anyone you like to a workplace, provided that person is a OnePlace user.

The first step therefore, is to have these external people sign up for an account in OnePlace. Since OnePlace offers a free personal plan, there is no expense for them to use OnePlace in order to collaborate with your team. Just have them sign up here for a personal account. Note that if these external users later decide they want to create their own team account to take advantage of the additional benefits provided to team accounts, it's very easy to combine their personal accounts into a single team account.

Once they have signed up, go to the dashboard of the workplace you would like to add them to, and click the Add button on the Members panel. The dialog that appears will allow you to enter the email address of an external user you would like to add. Use the Save and Add button to quickly add each of the external users to your workplace. We recommend that you do not make these users administrators of the workplace, however this is strictly up to you, and if it makes sense to do so, go right ahead and do that. After you've added them to your workplace, they will receive a notification in their inbasket letting them know they've been added to the workplace.

Since these people now belong to your team's workplace, the workplace will automatically appear on their Home page, and they will be able to go into the workplace and view/modify the data within it. They will have the same rights within the workplace as you and your teammates, so they will be able to participate in discussions, have work assigned to them, post notes, etc. Note however that they will not have access to any other data in your team's account that is not within this workplace. So, if your team has other workplaces that contain sensitive information, these users will not have visibility to any of that data.

You may have noticed that nowhere above does it mention that you need to add external users to your team's account in order to collaborate with them. That's because it's not necessary, and actually not recommended. If you were to add them to your team's account, these people would be able to create new workplaces within your account, probably not what you intended.

Hopefully you find this article helpful in understanding how to get the most out of OnePlace's many collaborative features. Happy Collaborating!