Hello! I’m part one micro-division of Columbia University and I’m trying to figure out how to organize my team well in Asana. We can’t utilize the “team” option because a different micro-division of Columbia University already has created an organization based on the handle “@columbia.edu”. Does anyone have an idea of how we can organize projects by team without having the ability to use teams? I’m thinking potentially using different workspaces for each team but then not sure about the collaboration across workspaces… Please help! TIA.
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Hi, I’m at Columbia Univ as well and am having the same problem. Did you ever get an answer to your question? It’s driving me crazy.
A client is also a major university and I just looked into this with help from Asana Support; I’ll share (and @Marie or @Natalia please verify):
Summary
- Create Team (say, “Team 1”) in the columbia.edu Organization. Make it be “Hidden” or “Membership by Request” to keep it separate from others at Columbia. Add desired team members to this team.
- If desired (e.g., if your current Workspace is Premium or Business), ask Asana Sales/Support for a Trial Upgrade to Premium or Business.
- Use normally, or consider https://ditto.kothar.net/ to copy project(s) from your existing Workspace.
- If ok, ask Asana to make the trial permanent and make a Division (“Division A”; you would use the name of your division within Columbia) and add “Team 1” as the first Team in this Division. (Info on Asana “Divisions”: Learn about divisions in Asana | Product guide • Asana Product Guide)
- At this point, the billing owner can use her avatar menu > Admin Console to add to “Division A” more existing teams in columbia.edu (anyone at columbia.edu can create those teams but only the billing owner for the Division can add them to the Division).
- Cancel the old Workspace to avoid more billing there.
All users will still only see columbia.edu in their avatar menus; “Division A” doesn’t appear there (though the billing owner will also see the division’s admin console). The Division itself does not appear in the left sidebar either; you’ll see your Division’s Teams there as well as any other public Teams in columbia.edu, so presumably you’d want to drag your Division’s Teams to the top of your left sidebar.
Asana Support advised the following as well:
With a Division, you can upgrade multiple Teams under a single subscription and each user will only count towards a single seat. Please note that there are some restrictions on
these Plans:
- Divisional Plans function similarly to Team Plans, and while you’ll
have access to paid features when working out of the Teams in your Plan,
you will not have access to Organizational level features like admin roles. - The Billing Owner of your subscription will need to belong to all
Teams in your Division. - The Billing Owner can add or remove Teams from their Division at any
time. They can also edit each Team’s settings directly from the Admin
Console.
Hope that helps,
Larry
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@Marie or @Natalia, I’m working with a large organization using a Premium Division with a bunch of seats. The organization it’s in is just the free plan.
Is it only the Billing Owner who can add Teams to the Division (to enable the Premium features)?
There can only be one Billing Owner at a time, right?
Do “Administrators” not apply in this context? They seem to have permission to do various admin functions and I was hoping the billing owner could add one or more Administrators to help with the above create-team-in-division issue, because otherwise creation of every single team must funnel through this single billing owner.
Thanks,
Larry
Update: @Marie and @Natalia, I found Learn about divisions in Asana | Product guide • Asana Product Guide so I see Admins can be designated in a Division, but the doc doesn’t make clear if they can add teams into the division or only the billing owner can do that. What can one of the Admins of a Division do?
By the way, searching for “Division” or “Divisions” doesn’t result in the page Learn about divisions in Asana | Product guide • Asana Product Guide appearing in the search results.
Thanks,
Larry
Hi @lpb and sorry for the late reply here, I’m only catching up on my follow-ups now 
Yes, there can only be 1 billing owner but multiple Admins. I believe only the Billing owner can add teams to the Division (since it can technically increase the number of members in the division and move you to a higher tiers plan).
This is currently expected. As Divisions are still very manual we’re keeping this article private and share it with users when they create their division with the help of our support team. But we’re working toward making them more manageable in-product. Once we’re ready to launch them more broadly, we will make this article public!
Hope this helps, but let me know if you need any additional clarifications!
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Thanks very much, @Marie!
Larry
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Hi Marie and @lpb - Good grief. I happened upon this while looking for something else in the forum. Thank you, Larry, for initially answering and Marie for the followup answer as well. 2019 seems like a decade ago with the pandemic and all. I hope you two fared well during that time.
I reached out to our tech office that first year and two major reasons held me back from going forward with it. The first is that I could only pay the fee using my budget line in order to have my students or my office colleagues to be part of the teams I set up. This is especially true now because my budget has been cut for the upcoming year.
I asked if I could pay for it myself and that wasn’t possible either. It is too costly for me to do so and for the second reason, it just wouldn’t be worth it.
Second, getting buy-in from my student workers was difficult and my office mates were not interested at all. I work with international students and I had to wait four months in 2019 just to be approved for my paid zoom account. The attitudes shifted but I still can’t see this going forward without a lot of bureaucracy.
I decided to keep Asana for personal task management but the best aspects of it are in the pro version. I’m still trying to give it a go but I think I will be switching to Todoist. It’s cheaper and they offer Asana’s paid features for free. I hope that my employer will change its mind but I’m not sure about that happening any time soon.
In any case, thank you for looking into this issue! I will keep my account as a reference tool since I have a lot of random information stored in there.
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