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New functionality for managing Airtable at scale

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Jordan_Scott1
Airtable Alumni (Retired)

Calling all admins! We are delighted to share that starting today everyone on the Enterprise plan will see updates aimed at helping you manage users and ensure security as your organizations grow. The new functionality you will now have access to include:

  • A streamlined new Admin Panel experience
  • New ability to create and leverage User Groups
  • New security controls and improved monitoring tools
  • Improved performance and base management settings

More detailed information for each of these updates can be found below, but we hope these improvements will help your businesses thrive. We will make sure to keep you all informed as we continue to make updates and refreshes.

Redesigned Admin Panel

First up is a change you’ll notice pretty quickly: a complete redesign of the Admin Panel. The Admin Panel is an Enterprise plan feature that lets administrators proactively manage their users, control access and security, and understand how teams are using Airtable.

We’ve added functionality so you can:

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User Groups

For an organization with many employees, adding or removing teams of individuals to bases can take time, and be error-prone. Say hello to User Groups! User groups will enable you to create and manage groups of users with which you can easily share bases and workspaces.

With user groups, creators on Enterprise plans can easily:

  • Invite groups and teams to a specific base or workspace with just a few clicks
  • Manage permissions and access for groups, not just individuals
  • Reduce the time it takes to onboard or offboard users as they change teams
  • Connect user groups in Airtable with your identity provider to leverage a single source of truth for user permissions

Enhanced sharing restrictions & audit logs

Audit logs help admins monitor activity and identify potential risks. Customers on our Enterprise plan can retrieve audit logs programmatically through an API or manually via the Admin Panel. If you’re retrieving logs through the Audit Log API, you can also connect it with a third-party security information and event management (SIEM) tool, and proactively set up alerts.

:zap: Pro tip: For organizations on the Enterprise plan, we also offer an Enterprise API that allows admins to programmatically manage users, bases, and workspaces in addition to the Audit Log API.

We also released workspace sharing restrictions to give you more control over who has access to what data. This feature allows admins and workspace owners to restrict invitation and sharing capabilities on a workspace, to limit who can access more sensitive information.

Improved base performance & management

We have improved loading times for bases with 10,000+ records, which has resulted in faster load times for large bases. This will be rolled out to all Enterprise customers over the coming months. You can also expect to see improvements when it comes to smoother interactive performance and increased record limits.

Last, but certainly not least, we’re also excited to announce several new changes to the overall view management experience, which make it easier to manage views at scale in large bases that will be rolling out over the coming weeks. These include:

We can’t wait to hear your thoughts! As always, please don’t hesitate to share your thoughts below.

10 Comments
Cameron_Kaiser
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

Is there a way to ensure duplicated views default to collaborator views? Duplicating views is a big part of base construction and this recent change now automatically generates all duplicated views as your own personal view, which is not going to be a desired behavior for any base designer.

What makes it particularly jarring is that it will scroll the View panel all the way up to “Your Personal Views” to show you the new personal view it just duplicated for you. You can’t move “Your Personal Views” so any time you duplicate a view you are going to lose your spot in the view menu.

Ruchika_Abbi1
7 - App Architect
7 - App Architect

Amazing to see so many updates coming from Airtable! @Jordan_Scott1 appreciate keeping the communications open! Would love if there was more clarity on what the pricing of Enterprise plan was without needing to contact Sales. Especially now that there is a push on using Apps on Airtable with the Interface designer and also the updated Admin controls.

Paul_Warren1
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

@Jordan_Scott1, I agree with Ruchika’s sentiment.

With recent updates, it looks like there will be “Non-enterprise” settings where Enterprise-only features will be very useful. I understand these may have been more expensive features to implement/maintain, but user permissions would be massively useful even in use-cases where the free or Pro plan would otherwise be sufficient.

Thank you!!!

Jordan_Scott1
Airtable Alumni (Retired)

Currently, within large bases, duplicating a collaborative view or a personal view will default to personal - we encourage personal view creation so that users can play with data without affecting other collaborators’ views. However, we recognize that users have different preferences for default behavior here so we’re glad you raised this here. We appreciate the valuable feedback and have provided it to our product team, who are considering potential solutions to take such preferences into account for the scenario you’ve described.

kuovonne
18 - Pluto
18 - Pluto

Thank you very much for the announcement of these features.

I also really appreciate the fact that the What’s New page explains that the features are gradually rolling out. This way people know that if they don’t have the features yet that they just need to sit tight and wait. More details on the gradual rollout would be nice – e.g. rollout start and end dates. I think the base used to say this, but I don’t see it now.

Regarding having new views defaulting to personal or not, here is my suggestion. If the person creating the view is an editor, have the view default to a personal view. If the person creating the view is a creator, have the view default to a group view.

RnJ
8 - Airtable Astronomer
8 - Airtable Astronomer

@Jordan_Scott1 Will this apply to Pro customers as well or just Enterprise customers? My bases become difficult to use or even start to fail around 28~30K records. Granted I have a lot of fields and quite a few calculations that don’t help with performance. However, I think if Pro is advertised for 50,000 records then we should get 50,000 records if Airtable has the ability. Thanks!

Improved base performance & management

We have improved loading times for bases with 10,000+ records, which has resulted in faster load times for large bases. This will be rolled out to all Enterprise customers over the coming months. You can also expect to see improvements when it comes to smoother interactive performance and increased record limits.

Jordan_Scott1
Airtable Alumni (Retired)

@Ruchika_Abbi1 @Paul_Warren1 Thank you both for your thoughts here, we really appreciate it! I can definitely see how some of the admin features we’re shipping for our Enterprise users could be helpful for Pro users as well. We have dedicated teams that are focused on our admin experience, and I will pass this feedback along to them.

Also, to provide some insights into Enterprise pricing - right now, all Enterprise conversations go through our sales teams to help us determine the right contract structure and plan to fit each customers’ needs. Many of our Enterprise agreements have some level of customization, but we are discussing ways to help our customers better understand our pricing model across all plans.

I hope this is helpful!

Jordan_Scott1
Airtable Alumni (Retired)

@RnJ Thank you for calling this out! Performace work will be applied to all plans, not just Enterprise. :slightly_smiling_face:

Zach_Young
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

Yay! I noticed some changes to the loading interface weeks back, and it seemed like loads got slower at the same time… :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

All part of the plan? :grinning:

jodyblueoceanba
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

We just switched to Enterprise and I have question about user’s seat (license) type.  

What do Builder, Contributor, and Viewer correspond to?  

I'm assuming Builder has same abilities as the Creator permission and Contributor has same as Editor permission?  But does Viewer have the same permissions as Read-Only or Commenter?

Thanks!

Jody