View only access to projects/tasks for clients

We have some clients and our development team both in Asana. We don’t want to expose our entire team to our clients, and vice-vera. A lot of tasks and comments also don’t make sense to expose to our clients. So we end up with developer focused projects, and client focused projects. We end up having to do a lot of duplication of tasks, jumping back and forth, multiple tasks to complete, etc.

  • What would be AWESOME would be the ability to assign an user a “external only” or “internal only” status.
  • Each project, task, and comment would have a toggle to make it “external” with the default state being “internal”.
  • If a project is external, the default states would cascade to tasks and comments
  • Similarly if a task is external, cascade to comments
  • Users with external status would only be able to see external projects, tasks, and comments.
  • External content created by users with “internal only” status would be anonymous to external users, and they wouldn’t show up as collaborators.

With this setup, we could have all developers and clients in the same project, receive tasks from clients, discuss internally on the same task, ask client a question on the same task, have all developers see clients comment, discuss internally, respond and assign to client. Client would only see and receive notifications for applicable questions / comments, and only users (PM or lead developer) who are client-interfacing would show their personally identifiable info to the client.

THIS WOULD BE YUUUUUUGE

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Hi @Matt_Healy and thank you for taking time to share this great feedback!

I’ve gone ahead and merged your post with an existing thread in the Forum to consolidate feedback on this topic. I hope it’s OK.

Have a great Friday Matt! :slight_smile:

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Hello @Natalia -,

can you give us info about this feature?? We don’t want our clients to see all tasks / conversations/ . creating 2 projects (internal / external) isn’t an option since we work with more than XX clients


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Hmmm, I guess there are many people still want this feature.
Me too!

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Hi Natalie,

Was this feature implemented? We are researching different online productivity tools with Asana winning so far. But a big requirement for us is to have the ability to share the project timeline etc with clients. We don’t want them changing anything, just a view that updates for them to keep track of the project.

Has this feature been added to Asana now? :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Anthony

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@Chris_John would the app be integrated into ASANA to make a split function for internal vs external comments and task permissions? If so, then I wold love to talk more about his because I have been looking for something like this at my agency.

Competitors already have features for this issue. Most that I have seen simply have a way when you go to add a user to a project or team to say this person is a ‘teammate’ and this person is a ‘client’. Then on tasks, lists, etc. there is usually a checkbox to the effect of ‘Don’t show this to the client’. Its a really simple concept. We just moved from another system and we were very surprised that this feature didn’t exist already.

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You’re right, this would be really useful.

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Assuming this may have already been mentioned above or some what inferred, but a huge addition to the client option would be that they don’t need an account to access, reply or attach files.

One possible simple work around, until full “Client Mode” is a thing, might be to allow something similar to “Email Forwarding”, “Email to Project Conversations” or " Auto-Forward Emails", but to a task or tasks so the Client could simply reply to and email and it would add that reply to the task. This would also assume that we’d be able to “@” them to some how send them a reposne from with in a task?

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I’ve read some old posts from a couple years ago with this request - has this been recently addressed? This is the one feature that keeps me looking for other task management options. I have a couple clients that want to see statuses but don’t have time to join a program and have another login to keep track of. They won’t do it. I’d like to have a link I can share with them of a list view that they can simply view.

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Welcome to the Community Forum @anon26900399, and thank you for taking time to share this feedback!

I’ve gone ahead and merged your post with an existing thread in the Forum to consolidate feedback on this topic. I hope it’s ok!

Would be really useful for us as well! Looking forward in hopes it will be deployed. The best option in our opinion is have a checkbox in every comment of a task making it external and visible to all the guests. Without this checkbox the comment should only be visible to the project team.

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Im assuming this issue has yet to be solved reading through the threads? Im new to Asana and assumed this would be a functionality - or at least to print the timeline as PDF and send on to client without having to use print screens?

Upvote for this idea.

I have adopted Asana as my primary platform for devops, replacing Microsoft Devops. Pretty happy with the decision, much easier to manage and use on a daily basis.

But one feature I am sorely missing is the ability to just link out a board view of a project (containing bugs or features) for anyone in our business to view or see.

At the moment I’m taking screengrabs and posting them on internal comm channels, but its not great. Also having to manually mock up reporting to senior management which is also a pain.

A public URL that can be published, or even managed through a seperate tab would be huge for me. Available in other platforms, such as Trello, and think it would be a good option for devops style use in Asana.

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like most people, I’m here looking for a client restricted view, off to search Google again now

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+1. We’re switching from Monday.com and one of the things we’re going to miss is being able to create View Only URLs to timelines and boards. It didn’t require the client to create a login or anything, they just had to bookmark the URL. They aren’t going to love the idea of needing a login to view project status now and also we’re having to problem solve how to handle what we want them to see and what is too much information. For example, we want them to know overall project status or when they have to do something, but we don’t want them to have to see our Designers debating design decisions back and forth.

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Agree - Ability for clients, for us vendors, the ability to access a project or select tasks with without having to log in would be a HUGE help for us. Currently we still have to maintain a basecamp account and use that to communicate to them. Obviously its a big time suck as we have to then also migrate things over to Asana or the google sheet we use to track things too.

Hi @Emily_Roman any news about this topic? As @Brian_Gotts mentioned, we are often asked to share project’s timelines with our clients. Since we have multiple information in our boards that we don’t want to share with them (e.g. tasks size, external collaborators, internal discussions, etc.) we are currently forced to duplicate the project board just for our clients. As you can guess this is causing extra effort – and increased risk of error – within our project managers.

It would be very appreciated to see something to meet this shared need since 2017, thanks.

Hi everyone, I’m excited to announce that we are rolling out a new feature that allows you to share your projects with read-only links! This feature will be available on Timeline and Calendar view soon, see more details in the announcement below:

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