Collaboration

Overview

Collaboration is a premium feature set that allows users to share projects or office masters with anyone, including contributors outside of your company, and send projects and office masters to other SpecLink Cloud accounts.

This article contains:

• Confirm if Collaboration is Enabled
• Catalog Entitlements
• Sharing a Project
• Sending a Project

Confirm if Collaboration is Enabled

There is an easy way to see if collaboration is enabled on a SpecLink Cloud account, outside of contacting the system manager to check with the account representative or contacting support.

Follow the steps below to confirm the Collaboration tools are enabled for your SpecLink Cloud account:

1. Click the 3-dot menu on a project to access the sharing options.
   
   
2. If the "Send" option is greyed out in the list of options, and the "Share" option is not visible, that is an indication that Collaboration is not enabled. There will also be a tooltip when hovering over the option.
   
   
   
   
3. If the "Share" and "Send" options are both visible in the project menu and appear greyed out, that it an indication that the user doesn't have the role permissions to share or send projects. There will also be a tooltip when hovering over the options to indicate it is an access issue.
   
   

If you have questions, please reach out to a System Manager or contact Support.

Catalog Entitlements

When subscribing to SpecLink Cloud, every account has choices of which catalog entitlements in which they wish to be included. These catalogs can be found in the Catalog column of the Sections list, indicated by various shortened letters, to show which sections are included in which catalog entitlements. Hovering your mouse, as shown below, will give the full text breakdown of each catalog that section is considered to be included.

When collaborating with other users within SpecLink Cloud, the users catalog entitlement must be taken into account to ensure a seamless collaboration process. Understanding the access limitations when collaborating with differing catalog entitlements is important to making the most of sharing and sending projects with any outside contributors. 

Sharing a Project

SpecLink Cloud users can share projects with others outside of their account. You do not need to be the project admin to share it. If the project appears in your projects list, and you have access to the sharing feature, you can share the project.

When sharing a project, both the project sharer and the recipient work together on the same project. All edits and comments from both parties will update in real time, making it a great collaborative environment.

There are some important notes and limitations to sharing projects:

• The recipient of the shared project does not need the collaboration feature enabled to receive a shared project.
• The recipient of the project does not need a SpecLink Cloud account, but will be restricted to view only.
• Shared Projects still maintain catalog entitlement of the recipient. For example, if section 334100 is not accessible in the recipient's catalog, they will be able to activate and deactivate the section, but will be limited to view/comment only within the section.
   
  
  

For the full article on sharing projects, please see this guide article. 

Sending a Project

Designed for collaborators who work with outside contributors​, users with collaboration enabled can send a copy of a project to another company level SpecLink Cloud account holder​. When sending a project, it is making a direct copy of the project and delivering that copy to another SpecLink Cloud account. Once a project has been sent, the collaborative experience ends there within SpecLink Cloud as both parties now have unique copies of the same project that they can edit separately. 

Some prerequisites to send a project are as follows:

• The Project Sender must hold a SpecLink Cloud account with collaboration enabled.
• Recipient ​must also hold a SpecLink Cloud account with collaboration enabled.
• Projects will be sent overnight. An email will be sent to the recipient once the transfer project job is complete.
• Sent projects still maintain catalog entitlement of the recipient. For example, if section 334100 is not accessible in the recipient's catalog, they will be able to activate and deactivate the section, but will be limited to view/comment only within the section.

For the full article on sending projects, please see this guide article.