Add non-paying user to Organization with view only access

Hello Asanas!

We are an organization under the free plan and my team is on premium plan. I wanted to add another user only as guest. But he is in the same organization. Is this possible?

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Organization membership is based on the email domain associated with the organization. Anyone that joins the Asana organization associated with @company.com with an @company.com email address, for example, will be a full member, and not a guest. So in this case, your colleague will be a full member (with all the benefits!), and can not be designated as a guest.

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I guess we have no choice. Either we add him in the team (and pay for his seat), or we’ll just add him to some projects directly.

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Are you already at your max on your current plan seats, which are in 5 person increments? If not adding them as a full member will not change your billing rate.

If it were possible to add a guest with the Organization email domain for free, they would never sell more than the 5 user plan.

If they have a separate email address (with a different domain), you could invite them to the Team using that email address instead of their organization email address.

We want to be able to add co-workers with the same email domain as guests, instead of counting against our number of users. Currently, product functionality only allows outside emails to be added as guests.

Our non-profit marketing team is small, only 3 people. We’ve started using Asana to track all marketing requests from other departments and programs. As a non-profit, we have limited number of users due to budgetary concerns. A great deal of our staff works with animals/the public primarily, and wouldn’t have a need for Asana as a user.

However, there is benefit to having staff that submits requests to be able to check-in/track the progress of their request, without coming to our marketing team to always follow-up.

Additionally, adding hourly employees’ personal emails to Asana could create concern for HR.

Currently we don’t have any workarounds, other than letting employees follow-up with us in-person or via email. This can be time-consuming and distracting.

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We also have another use case for this scenario. We are using a support email to forward emails directly into asana as a ticketing system which uses our org domain. This email is not a person and will not be needing member benefits. In order to forward emails from our support email, we have to add this email to our organization which would automatically bump us up to the next tier.

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Yes! We have this issue as well. We would like to upgrade, but are struggling with the idea of paying for 10 additional seats at a higher premium for internal users who only need to login a few times a year to review a project they requested. It seems like there should be another “reviewer” user tier with some number of free active seats that limits access to a specific tasks, like an LAM but with more restrictions potentially.

7 Likes

I would love to see internal org members be able to be assigned limited permissions - such as “Guest” or “Reviewer”. We have a core team that produces content for a large number of stakeholders - none of whom are involved in the production process beyond just needing to be notified of updates and offer feedback. There’s no reason to have 200 full-access seats for folks that hop in and out to review work on individual projects, and we’d love to be able to toggle folks within our org to “Guest” permissions easily. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this issue so far. Hope to see more voices added to this!

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It is really painful not to be able to invite someone just as a reader. Please do something !

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I upvote this big time - It’s not fair having to support the cost of an additional seat, only because someone in our same company (therefore sharing our domain extension) has decided to test Asana and subscribed with his/her company email address.

Also, we have colleagues from other departments who would like to have pure visibility (not edit access) to some of our projects in order to assess progress, timelines and resources involved. Why not to allow this as it’s the case for any “guest”, if not just because Asana can profit from an additional seat? I’m genuinely asking what’s the thinking behind the idea that anyone with the same email domain should enter the organization as a paying member by default.

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Much agreed with the comments that have bene left here. I think it’s a massive oversight of Asana to not allow same domain emails to be guests and have to be members by default.

Makes me feel Asana is catering to enterprise-level orgs much more than small businesses, like mine. :roll_eyes:

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Also experiencing issues with this. I would like to be able to use the platform for Customer Success planning and I am willing to pay for the team’s seats. However, having to pay for additional seats for executives and members of other teams that only need read access for transparency purposes seems pretty unfair. Does anyone at Asana monitor this forum? Are any improvements planned?

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Have been fishing around to work this out. Big time up vote on this!

My team uses Asana but we are the only department in our company and at this stage aren’t expanding our seats plan but just want to give other department members some visibility of certain projects with limited editing access but more just for the visibility on a project so we don’t have to double up on documenting in other places for them to see what is going on. Would love to see this possible even though we share domains.

Might have to work around and get them to make a gmail just to have them as a guest.

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Another upvote for this.

I can see people in the chain are talking about how this caters to enterprise level rather than small business, but to provide a perspective from the NHS - I direct a team which tracks programmes and project delivery with around 300 programme / project managers / management across a range of different teams who need and have full member licenses that we are paying for, but we really need to be able to have some users out in our clinical teams to be able to see progress and actions - and have no need for a full license.

To compound matters - the entire NHS is on a single email domain nhs.net and so I also cannot collaborate with people in a different NHS Trust who are completely outside of my organisation. 1.4 million staff who cannot be guests. I presume there is the same issue with .gov.uk emails. I shouldn’t have to pay for full licenses for what would be guests if this functionality existed within Asana.

As I work in the NHS we cannot use any workarounds with personal / gmail email addresses as there are information governance issues associated with this.

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In addition to being able to register users on the same domain as guests, I think it is also important to have an authorization step in order to authorize or not the occupation of a “seat” in ASANA, either in plan or over plan.

In our organization there are more than 1.000 employees and it is very difficult to control new users in ASANA. May be there is a configuration inside ASANA where it’s possible to indicate that new users need authorization from “superadmin” to occupy a “seat” as a member? Dou you know if this is possible?

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Another upvote for a “view only” option for people with the same domain. We have team members who don’t need to comment, have anything assigned, or interact with our projects other than the ability to view the information. Having a limited-user option within the organization would be massively helpful and in our case wouldn’t reduce licenses, it would just reduce the workload on the licensed users!
Has anyone found any workaround other than making people create another email to be a Guest? It’s crazy that you can do so much with a Guest user but there are such strict limitations within an org.

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An Asana rep flagged a workaround: If you add a domain user as task collaborator (rather than assignee), they will not count towards your team licenses. This would allow them to take action on the task while using their domain email. The downside is that they would only have access to the task level object and not get visibility into the full project task list (or other paid features, of course).

However, I’m having trouble finding the above workaround in writing anywhere. Can anyone direct me to this in writing or confirm from personal experience?

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Welcome, @Whitney_B,

I don’t believe the workaround you reported is true; either you were given the wrong information or something got lost in the translation. (And that’s why I don’t think you’ll ever find it in writing!)

This is how it works, from earlier in this thread, and to be a Collaborator, the user would have to have a login and thus become a Member:

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The only workaround I can think of is for that person to use a personal email for the account. Or to create a dummy email (Gmail, Yahoo, etc).

Then you invite the personal/dummy email that does NOT have the organization email.

Inconvenient, but works.