Again running into issues with not having more granular control of User Permissions. Wondering if this is on the Roadmap and if so (Though I know you can’t say when) is it one of the higher priority items?
Looks like there’s a lot of consensus here on how the permissions could be set up to meet nearly all use cases, and Google Sheets & Smartsheets both have working examples that would be a great start (a million times better than nothing at all).
I work in the office for a construction company and I’m checking out Airtable. I’m very close to getting tables set up so that we can use Airtable as our one, master system. Not having any fine-tuning for permissions may end up being a dealbreaker for us.
I’d like to give foremen the ability to checkmark a job complete, add remarks into a notes box, and upload photos, but I don’t want to give them blanket permissions and them accidentally delete or edit a table, record, etc.
The “old guard” here in construction is definitely not computer-savvy, so in addition to permissions control, only letting them see the 1 specific view they’ll use is very useful. One wrong click into another table/view and they’ll be lost.
A big concern with estimators/salesmen is that they don’t want their customer info out there for other estimators to try to steal.
Some of the formulas, rollups, and records would definitely need to be lockable, especially ones regarding money. Again, to help prevent someone mistakenly editing/deleting something. Imagine someone accidentally deleting a record for a six-figure project and it not getting billed.
Would love to move our spreadsheets to airtable, but need granular permissions, is it possible to have 1 large table with multiple users being able to access it.
Depending upon what we setup id like for instance : a table with 26 columns. Admin users would have read / write access to all 26 columns. Manager users would have read write access to the first 20 columns, and read only to the last 6. Staff users would be able to read / write the first 10 columns, read only the next 5, but not be able to see any others.
I would also love to see more granular permissions. Here’s our use case:
Inventory of department systems and data
Edits should be made by specific named users that are assigned by a super admin.
Those users can only edit records in their department, but they can view all other records
Those users cannot remove any records
Instead, they flag records for removal and an admin with delete control will take action to remove the record if approved
We can get some of this functionality in Airtable, but we need a user type that has create and update permissions, but does not have delete permissions to begin chipping away at this use case. Delegating users doesn’t make much sense right now without us being able to control deletes. This is for reasons of governance and audits.
@Hashim_Warren - That’s funny! Coincidentally, I had exactly the same experience with a content marketing group on Thursday! I actually built a demo base for them and did a one-hour presentation, but in the end, I can see that it will not work because of the number of freelancers they need to “partially” involve. Exactly the same issue!
I have a hunch that the barrier is philosophical not technical.
Airtable isn’t going after the Fortune 500. They want the Fortune 50 million. Businesses and use cases that are too small for anyone to really build a packaged database for.
That’s the fashion blogger keeping track of her sponsors and editorial calendar. That’s the family owned bodega keeping track of their inventory and suppliers.
That means Airtable is competing against Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets. Permission management isn’t what made both of those products so popular.
Airtable works for me because my co-workers actually use it. That’s a big difference with other products we tried.
So isn’t that crazy? I want more permissions to lock people out, but if it weren’t for the easy onboarding and adoption, Airtable would have failed at my last company.
I want to +1 this yet again. And I’ll keep requesting it until we get some sort of more granular control. Nothing too crazy, but it sure would be nice to at least specify specific tables as read only for specific User Types.
I’m doing annual clean-up on our main CRM & Sales base. Luckily I’ve got excellent employees so things haven’t gotten too messy, but there are inevitably erroneous records accidentally created… and every year (or whatever time period) this requires manual clean up.
So please, make 2018 awesome for those of us who care enough to post here (and the many more who could use it but can’t be bothered to post) and add a new User Type. Something with more permissions than Read Only but less than Editor. Thanks!
