Team Guests v. Limited Access Members

I saw the message this morning announcing the switch to limited access team members and am a little confused – will project guests no longer be a thing at all? Also, why are the limited members being counted towards Premium tier totals if they only have access to specific projects within a team? @Alexis can you share some context regarding this “improvement.”

We utilize the guest feature for our interns because they only need access to 2 projects out of the 50+ we have at a time. If we have to include them in our Premium count, that bumps us up a tier and leaves us with 4 open slots that will not be used in the near future. Our 2018 budget is already set so this unexpected added cost is going to cause some issues. Is anyone else in a similar situation?

@Ally_Balcerzak, good question, important to understand if the concept of outside guests with significant capabilities has now been eliminated. It does say someone can be a collaborator or an assignee without being counted as a member. I sent a support request on this and the reply was ". Organization subscriptions are not changed at all. This will only affect Premium Workspaces and Premium teams in free Organization." Any collaborator in a Free account I believe has been counted even before this. And in an organization, it is assumed that more often than not most have the same domain email address which automatically as I understand gets counted against available members. It seems that because a workspace does not have a domain per se this is an attempt to limit the unlimited use of Asana to any email address while paying for a small account. Again organization domain address counts everybody. If support is correct and you have an organization, your interns in “2 out of 50 projects” may have to use there personal email address if you don’t want the uptick on members. I believe they will still be able to see characteristics of Premium Teams and Premium Projects such as custom fields etc. Please let us know what you determine. Thanks

Based on a response I got from Customer Service today, it looks like anyone with your domain who is a project collaborator counts against your total.

From the sound of the reply you got, Premium Workspace users will be forced to upgrade their entire organization to avoid having to up their subscription count to account for in-company guests. As the first department using Asana, that’s brutal - we’re months away from bringing the rest of the company on but right now we need a few people to have access to select projects so they can see the functionality and interact with us.

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@Ally_Balcerzak According to my support request, Organizations have not changed. I never tested because I am a small user consultant, but I do believe you are correct that whenever a domain email address is used it will count as a member. Would it be possible for those few people that you want to observe only to use a non-domain email address. These would not count in an Organization but would could in a Workspace. Most people operating as a Workspace I am enclosed to believe are free accounts. I think the only inconsistency is a free Workspace can have up to 15 different emails (although if they are guest they now are severely restricted as a Limited Member) whereas an organization can only have the number of seats subscribed but have unlimited guests. So here is what I would do if I were you. Have those observers set up a g-mail account, add them as collaborators, then have all their G-Mail forwarded to their domain email address. When they get into Asana, because you are a Premium Organization they should see all the features you are using and switching to your Organization is of course very simple. Just a thought. Jim

For some that workaround may work, but for a company that has to follow strict security and confidentiality regulations, that’s just not realistic or safe.

Plus, if someone is going to use a system like Asana for work, they shouldn’t need to create a separate gmail account in addition to their company-assigned email. I know creating spare gmail accounts is common in the advertising industry, but as someone who literally has a running document of “other gmails,” the last thing I’d recommend to someone buying my product is to create yet another account.

I certainly hope other people bring this issue up with Asana so it can be evaluated and rectified. As of now, this new rule severely hurts new adopters who want to phase in the product across the company and need time to obtain buy-in.

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@Ally_Balcerzak To the best of my knowlege, and I have been using Asana for several years, anytime a domain user was added for anything it was counted as a member. Are you saying you believe a recent change caused domain collaborators only to be counted as members and you believe this was not the case before?, same question with guests that are domain users not a Team Member or Project Member. I could be wrong but if there truly was no change to Organizations this may have existed before.