Inviting people to a project

Everybody on a project was put there by somebody. This article covers doing the putting: your own colleagues, the subcontractors and consultants who work alongside you, and the people who only need one document rather than a project.

Somebody who is already in Teralo

Most of the people you work with regularly already have an account, and that is the easy case.

From the project's Directory, choose Global Directory. It searches every account in Teralo rather than only your own organisation's, so a consultant who works for somebody else is found here too. Select the person, choose the project permission template they should have, and they are added.

They are not asked to accept anything. The project simply appears on their dashboard the next time they open Teralo, and they are notified.

Somebody with no account yet

Create Account on the project Directory covers everybody else. Choose the organisation they belong to, enter their email address, name and job title, and pick their project permission template.

Teralo checks the address as you type and tells you if it already belongs to an account, which is worth watching: an account belongs to an email address, and typing a variant of an address somebody already uses creates a second account rather than finding the first. That is the most common reason somebody appears not to have been added.

There is no invitation to accept and nothing pending. The account is created immediately, the person is on the project straight away, and they receive a welcome email with their login details and a temporary password to change. If it has not arrived, the answers are a spam folder or a typo in the address, and the fix for a typo is to add them again with the right one.

If their company is not in Teralo either, Can't find their organisation? Create a new one opens a short wizard from inside the same panel: the organisation's name, business number and discipline, then the person who will administer it, then optionally a first worker, then a review before anything is created. See Directory.

Where the organisation you chose requires an administrator to approve its members, the person gets project access immediately and their organisation membership sits pending that approval. See Members and user applications.

Choosing the template

Choosing the template is the actual decision, and it is worth a moment rather than reaching for whatever is at the top of the list.

The presets cover most cases: Subcontractor for a trade contractor lodging their own work, Design Consultant for an architect or engineer, Inspector / Superintendent for a certifier, View Only for a client who needs to read and change nothing.

Where none of them fits, the answer is a template rather than an exception. Grant the least that lets somebody do their job, name it for the role, and reuse it. See Permission templates.

It is also worth telling people what to expect before the welcome email arrives. An email from software they have never used, carrying a password and access to somebody else's project, gets ignored or reported more often than it gets opened.

One document rather than a project

Not everybody who needs to see something needs an account.

A document can be shared as a public link, generated from the document itself. Anybody with the link can open it without signing in, and the link expires after 7 or 30 days, chosen when you create it. There is no permanent option, which is deliberate.

Use a link for a one-off: a drawing for a supplier quoting, a certificate for a certifier, a document a client wants to forward. Give an account to anybody with ongoing involvement, because a project's worth of links is worse than an account in every way.

People who never get an account at all

Some site roles do not need Teralo access and should not have it. Workers can register for induction, sign on to method statements and sign in and out at the gate through the project's public portal, with no account anywhere.

See The public portal, Inductions and Method statements.

Changing and removing access

Both are done from the project Directory. Editing somebody moves them to a different template; removing them takes their project access away.

Removing somebody from the project leaves their Teralo account and their other projects alone. Removing somebody from your organisation removes them from every project your organisation hosts, which is the right action when they leave the company.

Review the guest list occasionally rather than never. Consultants finish their involvement and subcontractors finish their trade, and access outlasting the work is how a project directory ends up with forty people on it and nobody sure who they are.

PermissionsHost only

Adding people to a project needs the permission to do so, which normally sits with project managers and administrators, and an organisation administrator always has it on projects their organisation hosts.

Note the deliberate split against Permission templates: assigning an existing template is a different and lower permission than editing what templates grant. Somebody who runs a project can bring people onto it without being able to invent new levels of access to give them.

Guests do not invite anybody. A guest organisation's own people are added by the host, or by their own organisation administrator once the organisation is on the project.