awork Connect - Invite your external partners

With awork Connect, you bridge the gap between your project team and external partners by sharing your project easily, directly, and free of charge. Invite them to collaborate on your project with awork Connect—whether they are agencies, clients, or freelancers.

🪢 Are you an external partner? Then take a look at the awork Connect article for external users here.

An external user gains access to a project from another workspace. Once the invitation is accepted, the shared project appears directly in the external person's workspace. To access the project, the invited person must either already have an existing workspace or set up a free awork Connect workspace. The invitation includes all necessary information to ensure a smooth start.

You can invite external persons in four ways:

☝️Important: External people cannot be added during project creation. You must first create the project.

💡 Hint: If you have already invited an external user to another project, they will be automatically suggested as soon as you start typing the first letters of their email address.

The external user receives an invitation via email along with information on how to proceed. Once the invitation is accepted, the person appears in the project settings under "Assigned users." There, you can assign a project-specific permission role or modify it afterward.

You can invite as many external persons to a project as needed. Once they accept the invitation, they become visible in the project. If the invitation is not accepted within three days, the external person automatically receives a reminder email. After the invitation is accepted, the inviting person receives an email notification.

Under Settings → General, you will find the button "Allow inviting external persons to projects (Connect)."

If you deactivate this button:

You can reactivate this feature at any time.

In the general workspace settings, there is a menu item called Connect. Here, all external people in your workspace are listed, including information about which project they belong to and when they were last active. Using the three-dot menu next to a person, you can directly open the project or remove the person from the project. The list can be sorted and grouped by last activity, project, or user. The search field allows you to search specifically by name, email address, project, or workspace.

When a project is shared with an external person, you can assign them to tasks within the project. Additionally, you can mention them in the activity log both in the project itself and in the project tasks. If the external user makes changes, such as updating the status of a task, you will be notified as usual according to your account settings.

An external person always automatically receives a project-specific permission role (defined specifically for external users) for the shared project.

The person’s general permission role in their own workspace does not matter, since access applies only to this one shared project. The workspace where the project was created determines the permissions.

When creating a new project-specific permission role, you can define whether this role should apply to external users. This setting is permanent and cannot be undone.

Editing rights for the project details cannot be assigned to external users.

You can make either entire task lists or individual comments invisible to external users. This option allows you to maintain clear internal communication without the need for additional tools.

To hide a comment, activate the button with the eye icon in the comment field. When the button is active, it is highlighted in red, and the comment is no longer visible to external persons.

If you want to make the comment visible again, you can edit it and deactivate the button.

If you want to hide an entire task list, open the three-dot menu of the list and select "Hide from external users." A note will then appear above the list indicating that it is hidden. To make the list visible again, open the menu once more and select "Show for external users." The note above the list will then disappear.

It is possible to completely hide tasks from external users so that they only see the tasks to which they are directly assigned. To do this, define in the project-specific permission role that external users have no general permissions for tasks. The external user will then only see the assigned tasks in the "My Tasks" tab and can access them through the "My Tasks" filter.