Sync between Team Workspace and Free Workspace

[JackLathrop01]

Hello All! 

I was wondering if anyone could explain in more detail how the sync feature works in relation to payment plans. We recently upgraded one of our workspaces to a team plan, and were looking at ways to have more users as read-only. 

I wanted to see if the Workspace with the Teams plan could operate as a large data repository, across departments and functions. and then have specific views feed into other workspaces. (i.e. A central place for customer data with a wide variety of customer types, and needs) Then the Teams workspace can handle automations, and large numbers of records, while the free workspaces are synced with a subset of the data. 

I attempted to sync from the Teams workspace to an unpaid one, and it said that it wouldn't work. But it seems to have synced anyway but may just not be updating. 

Please let me know if this is a viable option, or would there be an automation to automatically push any changes made to the Synced non-Teams Workspaces.

Thank you!

[TheTimeSavingCo]

I don't think that's possible at this time; when I attempt to create a synced table on a base in a free workspace I'm presented with the popup to upgrade my plan instead, so I'm surprised that you were able to do it at all

I assume you're creating synced views that include specific data and you don't want your read-only users to be able to see the other stuff?  If so, may I know what issues you faced with trying to use Interfaces for this?

[JackLathrop01]

Thanks for your reply Adam,

I got the same popup, which is why I was confused when it seemed to work. When I looked at it a little further it appears as if it is just copying all the data from that view. But the copied data loses the rest of the tables formatting such as filters and groups. 

The main reason we upgraded to the teams plan is because a few bases that we were building up ran into record and automation limits. I would like to be able to have workspaces where the data in the large bases is split into multiple smaller free bases. This way more of our team will have access to manipulate the data for their specific purposes.

Are there any automations that could export one bases data into another, that would primarily use the automations run on the parent table? as to not go over the limit in the free workspace. 

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Hmm, perhaps you could try scripting / third party integration tool?  Do an API call to update the free base when the main record is updated.  Free workspaces have a 1000 API call per month limit though so that's an issue

I'm kind of confused by the problem we're trying to solve, sorry!  If it's a record limit issue, we could create new bases in the Teams plan and sync views there.  If it's a total number of automations issue (i.e. >50 automations in a base), syncing data to another base in the Teams plan and creating automations should help with some of that.  And if it's a automation run limit issue (i.e. >25000 runs), then the Free plan bases wouldn't be of that much help as they only give 100 runs per month?

I feel like I'm missing something, apologies!

[JackLathrop01]

Thank you for all the help. I'm still fairly new to airtable so I am not explaining very well. 

We are a relatively small education non-profit, and having all of our previous airtable users on the teams plan is too expensive.  Our customer groups can be divided a number of ways (active/inactive, youth/adult, or class type). A given project may only need to reference one of those groups. Out total costumer list has more than 1000 records, but if it restricted to active students in a given program, it would be under 1000. 

My hope is that there would be a master base with ALL records in the team base with read-only access to most of our users. But I still want to be able to take the data for editing/manipulation by other users under a free plan in subsets below 1000 records.  

Ultimately, I think I will have to use scripting/APIs to do something like this. Our data doesn't change very quickly but a daily or trigger based "sync" that adds recently added records, or replaces the data would work.

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Ah thanks for the details!  Hmm, what kind of editing / manipluation would they need?

If they just need sort/filter/group type modifications, then an Interface with "read-only" set could work?  They'd set up their own sort/filter/group then bookmark that URL.  Not ideal, but much less work than the scripting?

[JackLathrop01]

I didn't realize that read-only could sort and group. Can read only do button presses on Interfaces to trigger automations? 

In most cases editing views could be enough but I want people on free plans to be able to make their own linked records. If the are planning an event they would have the event information in their own base, and the Teams enabled base can feed their base a list of relevant students which they can link to different events. There are plenty of examples of similar use cases for us (volunteers, donors, instructors, alumni). There is a lot of overlap in these groups and is the dataset that required us move to teams. But if someone just wants active donors to make a base where donations and donors are linked for a "donor profile", that could or should be in a non-Teams workspace. 

Could a button click in the teams workspace update or replace the data in another workspace, or maybe an update/submission based trigger? I am familiar with java but not airtable APIs, would it make sense to open a new discussion with API and Scripting tags? 

Thanks again for all the advice Adam! It is greatly appreciated.  

[TheTimeSavingCo · Accepted solution]

re: I didn't realize that read-only could sort and group. Can read only do button presses on Interfaces to trigger automations? 

I'm afraid not

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re: Could a button click in the teams workspace update or replace the data in another workspace, or maybe an update/submission based trigger?

Yeap that's possible, you'd make an automation and use the "Run a Script" action and do an API call to the base you want to update.  One thing to note is that the personal token will be exposed to anyone who has access to that base though (and also the 1000 call limit per month)

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re: I am familiar with java but not airtable APIs, would it make sense to open a new discussion with API and Scripting tags?

Yeap you might find that helpful!  There are various ways to keep data between two bases up to date and hearing how other people tackle it would give you more options

You could also look into using Zapier/Make.com as it'd take the scripting element out of it too

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A potential issue with this setup is that these automations will need to be set up manually?  That is to say, whenever someone needs something, they're going to have to tell you about it and you're going to have to create the base for them and set up the automations to point at that new base?

[JackLathrop01]

Thanks for all the help on this Adam. I would have to set up each automation, I think this is fine because of how infrequently we make new bases, and it gives me slightly more control over the data being shared. 

Thanks again!