New: Share projects with read-only links!

English Forum News Product Launches
1

Hey there!

I’m Eileen, a Product Marketing Manager at Asana. I wanted to share the great news that timelines and calendars of public projects can now be shared with cross-functional partners using read-only links! The read-only link is dynamic - it will always reflect the latest updates to the project and provide a living source of truth for cross-functional teams, even non-Asana users, to stay aligned.

Creating a read-only link is simple. Select “Create Link” in the upper right hand corner of the timeline view. Once a link is created, the timeline will show as “Link Active” and project members can copy and paste the link and share with others. Project members can also preview and deactivate the link as needed.

IPC Logged out view

Partners with the shared link will be able to see project name, tasks, assignees, and due dates. To view task details, create new tasks, and collaborate with the team, partners can join the project, if they are employees of the same organization.

For admins who may need to manage the flow of information in and out of Asana, there will be a setting available in the domain and division admin console. The “Read-only link sharing permissions” setting in the Security tab will enable/disable the feature for the entire company. Please review the Asana Guide article for more information about this feature and the admin controls.

This feature will be available gradually to Premium, Business, and Enterprise customers starting May. Based on early results, we may roll out this feature to all our Premium and up customers as planned, or roll it back. Stay tuned for more info!

If you see this feature on your timeline, check it out and let us know what you think! Soon, read-only links for calendar view will be available as well. We would also love to know which other views (ex: Board, List) would be most helpful to you.

  • Project list view
  • Project board view
  • Project overview
  • Project dashboard
  • Portfolios
  • Other (tell us in the comments!)
0 voters
25 Likes
2

I would love the ability to customize the public link to hide details that I want to keep private.

eg. Fields that are default and custom that I want shared

Ideally this would be something we can tailor on a link by link basis.

27 Likes
3

Definitely looking forward to updates around this feature!

I would like to turn entire tasks off from visibility, and set that at a template level.

Example: My team has plenty of “in-house” tasks on a project, but we would still like to show the client a slightly-more than basic overview of the project.

13 Likes
4

Hi @Eileen_Hwang - Is this functionality available today? I thought I’d see the link capability in my public projects on May 3.

5

@Mark_Nattress, Did you notice:

Larry

2 Likes
6

A read only calendar view link would be super helpful.

5 Likes
7

Awesome @Eileen_Hwang! Just gonna sit here and hit refresh until it appears in my account…

3 Likes
8

Hiding the assignee would be helpful, for sharing with partners where we don’t want to disclose that.

9 Likes
9

YES

1 Like
10

I love this future thanks a lot :slight_smile:

1 Like
11

This will be super helpful for executive reporting. As others have said, I’d like to be able to hide subtasks and control the level of detail shown.

5 Likes
12

Will this work with a Private Project?

Thanks!

2 Likes
13

No, a project needs to be set as public to be able to have a read-only link.

1 Like
14

Phil,

Thanks for info. – after all this time waiting for printing solution this is a bit discouraging. It would be very important to have the ability to share as private project…there are often confidential projects with outside stakeholders (e.g. Board members, legal counsel, etc.) that someone would not want to make the projects existence known to their whole Asana user base.

Thanks,

Russ

8 Likes
15

@Eileen_Hwang, I agree with @Russ_Friedson. What’s the rationale here? Asana is generally open with permissions; this seems needlessly restrictive. Anyone can print to PDF a private project and share that externally so there’s really no added security here. What about considering this: When you click on the Create link button, if the project is private, remind the user that the project is private and ask for confirmation before creating the link? Only allowing for public project links creates work about work for Asana users, I feel.

@Russ_Friedson, re your “waiting for printing solution” – you mean other than

(Just teasing…I’m the creator of that.)

Larry

4 Likes
16

How is this different than sharing a project and the person has rights only to comment?

Speaking of comments, I would LOVE the ability to hide / protect certain comments from view for certain types of users. This way, I could share a task or project with an outside customer/user and keep internal discussions on the same task.

3 Likes
17

Larry,

Thanks for making that available!!! Maybe Asana needs to hire you…:blush:

Best,

Russ

2 Likes
18

@lpb I think that is a project is private, it should only be accessible by project members in Asana. If we add the option to create a read only link, that would make the project public to more people outside of the project. As a workaround, you could create a private Team to home all the public projects, the public projects will only be accessible by the team members.

@Susan_Shevelenko with read only links you can share a project with people that don’t have Asana accounts. If you invite someone to your comment only project, they would need to first create an Asana account to be able to access.

Thanks all for your feedback! I’ve taken note of all the feedback shared so far, but if you’d like to share more I’d highly recommend creating a new thread in our #productfeedback category so we can track votes from other users as well! :slight_smile: Thanks again!

19

@Emily_Roman, If you’ve passed along my and @Russ_Friedson’s input to the product team, I’m all set, and thanks.

I’m aware of the workaround but don’t understand the choice made to require it (though i understand you don’t have as much of a problem with it!). Private/Public are terms with a context: people in this Asana org. A Public project can either be made visible or not to people outside this Asana org, so overloading that term Public doesn’t help with clarity. Further, I imagine that most often these links will be shared with a limited set of people (private) not most often with anyone in the world (public), so the usage of the new links are generally private, not public uses, further supporting the notion that it’s confusing to tie the feature to the existing meanings of Private/Public.

This may seem like a subtle point but, more and more, as Asana grows in complexity, I find it’s exactly this kind of gotcha that causes my clients to stumble. In order to use the link feature, they now have to reorganize their project/teams memberships, or access rights; this is an unfortunate, not-required design choice on Asana’s part. More and more gotchas like this (for example, expand/collapse subtasks in Lists–until you sort, then no longer available–that can sabotage a workflow at the last minute) and the product becomes less and less easy to use.

Thanks,

Larry

1 Like
20

@lpb,

I totally get this thrust of your point and agree 100% that it’s crucial to pay careful attention to avoiding making the product harder to use.

My counter-argument in this particular case, and why I agree with their design decision, goes to this point:

If it’s a private project, then by definition the owner does not want it to be publicly available. The problem with creating this new public link is that the owner, or anyone for that matter, can no longer control said access. You can say “most often these links will be shared with a limited set of people” but you can’t guarantee or control that. What if someone accidentally forwards an email where they don’t realize that down the email thread it has the link and now it’s out “in the wild”; or it may not even be accidental - someone may just not realize that it’s not supposed to be shared only to certain people and not others. The point being, once you share that link, it’s uncontrollable who will end up with it. And so I’d argue that lack of control is counter to the concept of a “private” project.