How to avoid a template owner being added as a member every time

Here’s the use case someone shared to the Asana Community recently:

:studio_microphone: My team is trying to use a project template (created by us) however, we don’t want the entire team to have access to the project template to avoid any potential mistakes in the template. We’ve made it so everyone on the team can comment except 1 person but now they are added to every project that is being created using that template. Has anyone else run into this issue and has anyone found a solution?

:thinking: This is indeed an issue, because that poor person will be on every single project created from the template! In addition, she ends up being the only one that can edit the template.

:champagne: Here’s the solution: create a guest account (like yourcompany-asana@gmail.com) and make that guest the owner of all templates. You can share the credentials with a few people, and no one will ever be bothered again!

:mag_right: Reminder: when you are setup as an Organization, you don’t pay for guests.

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Guests accounts don’t have the ability to access rules. Also according to the API they can’t access custom fields, although it seems they can in the web app, so I’m not sure what’s going on there.

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Good point, I updated the post.

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Yes, I face the same issue with all the templates I created.
What I did was a used the handover to business as usual stage to solve this issue.

Every time the project template is finalised and ready to be owned by process owners, I have moved the ownership of the project to them and removed myself from it. This way when they create their projects from the template, only relevant people can be notified.

Having said that, I like your proposal of having one guest / ghost account which can be the owner of all templates.

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Yes because even in your case the head of Business will be added everywhere possibly :confused:

There is no rule access for guests’ accounts. In addition, according to the API, they are not able to access custom fields, yet they seem to be able to do so in the web application, which makes me wonder what the problem is.

A guest can definitely access a field and change a value. They can’t create fields though.