Should I use Workspaces or Organisation?

I have used Kothar and it worked well but no guarantees

@Marty_Potter that sounds good! It’s been fun collaborating with you on this.

So, it seems my tests were somehow flawed. A guest cannot search for another guest in another Team and therefore cannot @mention or add them to a project/task. At least that’s what Tech support have told me when I added a new guest recently.

After changing to an Organisation type, an existing guest was moved into another team but still shows in searches, however a new guest that has been added since converting to an Organisation cannot be searched for.

This breaks my workflow. Badly. Everything I was testing was dependent on what a guest could do whilst keeping a concept of Teams with separation. I was under the impression that whilst a guest could not browse other teams or see other guests in a list, they were still searchable and therefore could either request team membership or @mention other guests by name or add them to tasks etc. They can’t. Only Organisation members can. Conversion from a workspace to organisation is not the same for everyone

Another annoying limitation is that @mentions of Teams or Tasks by Org members may show as “private” so there is no way of the guest knowing what the reference was and therefore ask an Organisation member to add them.

As a minimum, I need to figure out a way to allow guests to find other guests in other teams so they can be added to tasks as collaborators. Adding everyone to every Team defeats the purpose of having separate Teams, and I really want to avoid having to set up an Organisatonal email for everyone that joins because of the nature of our non-profit.

Thoughts welcome!

Good to see you, @Marty_Potter!

I have a few workaround suggestions for you and I’m curious to hear from the rest of the community, as well.

Some ideas:

  • Advise and empower guests to add other guests to projects as outlined here: Guest Accounts: Asana for Clients, Contractors, and Consultants - The Asana Blog
  • Weekly recurring tasks for yourself to see who belongs to which teams and projects, and add guests accordingly. This would take a bit more effort on your part, but it could help resolve confusion. You can see the projects and tasks to which each guest belongs by using the “export member data” option outlined here: New member management features for admins - The Asana Blog
  • I’m a big fan of creating reference projects, as well. Each task in a reference project would link to a referenceable project or task (ex. Task name: Product roadmap; task description: link to product roadmap project + and description that reads: The product roadmap for this quarter. Request to join this if you’re on the product team, marketing team, or you just want to be in the loop.). Then, if people want to join any project in this list, they could add a subtask request to be added to the project and assign it to you.
  • If you want people to know who the other guests are, you could also create a reference project that lists team member names.

Any other ideas for Marty, folks?

@Alexis thanks for these tips.

I am working on your concept of Reference Projects and considering other ways of doing it to minimise administrative overhead.

What I have discovered (I think) is I can add and immediately remove every guest to just one Public Project for everyone in that Project’s Team to be able to search guests.

As long as that Public Project remains active, it doesn’t matter if a foreign Team’s guests remain connected to that project or not. They stay searchable to that Team. Or at least that’s how it seems :slight_smile: I want to do more testing to be sure first.

If it’s true, in my Organsiation, every Team will have ongoing Projects (eg Tasks of current computer faults) that will never close, and I’ll just have to add/remove every new Guest to such a project in every Team. Not a big ask with 5 Teams and a relatively stable list of Guests!

I’m not sure how you use a reference Project to list Team member names, @Alexis. Wouldn’t that create a lot of duplicate visible projects for each person?

More to come after testing further!

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Glad you’re testing out the concept! I hope this works out for you. It’s been a journey and I’m eager to hear what you come up with.

Regarding your question about a names reference project: I had simply thought you could create a project that lists the names of everyone you’re working with. It could create more administrative overhead, however. Maybe avoid it unless absolutely necessary :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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What I’ve settled on (for now at least) is creating a new Team that I’ve called “Everybody”, but only myself (as a supervising Organisation Member) is part of the new Team.

I’ve then created a new Project called “Contact List” and added everyone from all Teams, particularly Guests, to this Project. This allows everyone to search who else is joined to Asana, and thus do @mentions etc of other Guests in other Teams to invite them to collaborate.

The “Everyone” Team now appears in each user’s sidebar. This gives some flexibility in that other Projects can be created for other purposes, like a “Social Hub” Project to allow less work-centric conversations for those that want to opt-in whilst being able to control these types of notifications separately from their real Team.

You’re probably thinking “just give everyone an org email address”! Its not as easy as it sounds. Trust me, for our organisation, it’s currently impractical.

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That’s a great work around Marty, I did something similar with one of our teams, but I just added them all to the team rather than a project. It’s not as clear as what you did with the Contact List project though…

And you’re right, not everyone can get an organization email address. They cost money, companies have multiple domains (like mine =|) and not everyone has xyz email, etc.

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So glad you’re seeing success with this, @Marty_Potter ! It’s been a journey. We’ll welcome any insights you can share with the Community as you spend more time with this process.

@Caisha I (humbly) believe the Contact List project Marty is referring to relates to this suggestion. :blush:

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Hi Asanaers!
So I’m just starting my set-up and haven’t found a definitive answer to my few parts question which is:

If I am an individual who intends to use Asana to manage my personal life, two personal small (aka just me and one or two others) businesses, and one or two other small businesses; would it be best to sign up with my personal gmail as a workspace or organization? Or with one of my business emails as a workspace or organization?

Do I set up the businesses I’d be managing as Organizations, Workspaces or Teams?

I am also an “employee” at one of the businesses I would be Asanaing for. So I have an email with that company.

And finally, If I want to manage all of these businesses and my personal stuff, am I the only one who needs a premium account if I want to take advantage of those benefits? Or do any and all team members working in those businesses need a premium account for themselves as well.

Long question I know! I appreciate any and all help!

Thanks!

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Hi @Kico_Mendoza! I recommend that you visit these threads. They should help you sort out the ideal option for you:

Hi guys :wave:t3: Just merging this thread with Should I use Workspaces or Organisation? to avoid having too many duplicates in the community!

@Alexis
If I setup an organization under email@ourdomain.com, is it possible to:

  1. Have someone with an outside (not our domain) email be an admin at the organization level?
  2. Can we add outside emails (not our domain) to teams within our organization?
  3. Can people have multiple email addresses attached to their account? (inside and outside domains)

For context: One of our owners uses his icloud account…it’s tied to everything he does, but he does have an email under ourdomain.com - it’s just not realistic for him to be using that as his primary asana account email.

or @Marie ?

Hi @Jared_Navarre and thanks for the mention!

  1. Only full members can become Admin, Guest can’t, so that’s not possible.
  2. Yes, you can add Guests to your Team following these steps: How to Complete Task Fields in Asana | Product Guide • Asana Product Guide. You can learn more about Guests (= users with an outside (not our domain) email) here: Setting up an organization in Asana | Product guide • Asana Product Guide
  3. Yes! Here is how you can add other email addresses to your Asana account: How to Control Your Profile Settings in Asana | Product guide • Asana Product Guide

Hope this helps Jared! :slight_smile: Let me know if you have any follow-up questions!

I should point out, you could probably have the company IT team set up an email@ourdomain.com address and have it forward to someone outside. Then you could have that outside person manage things. This of course leads to potential security implications, so discuss with the company IT, particularly if using Active Directory integrated logins.

Thanks for the read, it gave some insights, im in the same situation as @Marty_Potter, im part of a church IT team and before i joined, they already chose for the organizational method.

we have a staff team of 15 people, and a ton of volunteers. We do have a domain and connected that.

When we created a staff related team, we ended up with 1 or 2 outside of the group, as the teams are limited to 15 users. for this team im not to sad about it, we’ll manage, but for teams with larger volunteers groups, is the limitation of 15 still in play, or do guests/limited access members dont count against that number?

This completely determines if we need to find out other solutions on getting staff and volunteers in teams or if its ok.

last questions, there is no way to crossfix or see all tasks assigned to you from workspace and organizations? because that would be the alternative, having staff members manager their other workspace with volunteers and check off tasks when the workspace tasks are done.

Our workforce fluctuates alot, so i like the idea of a team where everyone is in to make sure you @mention and assign, but it falls apart when theirs a cap on users in that team.

thanks for the advise!

@henkjan If you have a church domain your biggest issue will be free or paid for edition of Asana. You can get into a 5 member premium package for I believe $375 per year. In an organization no guest uses up a member slot. The limitation you talk about is for the free edition and anybody using your domain whether having your domain address or not will be counted against the 15 maximum. I have set up a church and am very familiar with the issue. I find the cost to have a paid version of Asana well worth the phenomenal networking of volunteers you can have in an organization with unlimited guests. I would also say, if you are trying to cut cost while not ideal, just eliminate domain users that you know will not use Asana to minimize your seats. This is not the way it is suppose to work in a fully collaborating organization but unfortunately you find some people cost more for a member seat than they use the product. But if it catches on like it could you can find a way to fit it into the budget. Talk to one of your church members or volunteers how important using collaborative software could be to the ministry and maybe they will underwrite the cost. That is how my church got started using it.

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Thanks @James_Carl that is indeed an option. I could create just a few in the paid licenses and have either staff use a different domain and add all the generic volunteers

Good idea… ill test it over the weekend.

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