With awork Connect, you can close the gap between your project team and your external partners by sharing your project easily, directly and free of charge with external people. Invite them to collaborate on your project with awork Connect and off you go - whether agencies, clients or freelancers.

With the help of awork Connect, a user can gain access to a project in another workspace. This person is invited to the workspace as an external user and thus has access to the project. The shared project is then displayed in the external user's workspace. This means that the external person must have a workspace in order to gain access to the shared project. The external person receives further information about awork Connect and how to proceed after the invitation when invited to projects.

☝️ Important: awork Connect is designed for collaborating with external users. Therefore, it is not possible to invite your own colleagues to projects via awork Connect. They must have a license in your workspace. This restriction is based on the domain of the workspace creator. Are there valid reasons why you would like to invite your colleagues to your projects via awork Connect? Please contact our support for assistance. We will review your request individually.

There are four ways to invite an external person to your workspace.

☝️Hint: No external persons can be added during project creation. The project must first be created and only then can the external users can be added.

If you have already invited an external user to another project, they will be suggested to you as soon as you type in the first few letters of their e-mail address.

After having invited the person, an external project-based permission role can be selected, see permission management.

As soon as the external person has accepted the invitation, it appears in the project settings under Assigned users. The project-based permission role can then be subsequently adjusted there.

There is no limit of external persons to a project. A project can have unlimited external persons.

As soon as the external person has accepted the invitation, the user can be used in awork, i.e. you can only then assign the person to a task.

☝️Hint: The invited person will receive a reminder if they have not accepted the invitation after 3 days. If the external person has accepted the invitation and joined the project, the inviting person will receive an e-mail notification.

You can use the Enable button in the Settings under General to temporarily disable inviting external people. If the button is deactivated, you can continue to work normally with awork connect and the external people you have already invited. Only new invitations for external persons are then not possible. This way you can prevent unwanted external people from being invited. If you then want to invite new external people again, you can simply reactivate the button.

☝️🔐 Note: This button does not appear for users on a Basic Connect plan.

The external person gets a project-based permission role. The workspace-wide permission role that the person has in their workspace is irrelevant here.

When a new project-based permission role is created, you can select whether this role should apply to external users.

☝️Hint: Once this has been set, it can't be done reverse or changed.

An external person is not able to get the permission to edit the project details.

If someone invites you to a project as an external person, you will receive an invitation link by email. If you already have an awork account and therefore also a workspace, the project will be displayed in your existing workspace once you have accepted the invitation. If you have several workspaces linked to your account, you can select the workspace in which the shared project should be displayed (only one workspace possible).

☝️Hint: The decision as to which workspace the shared project should be displayed in CANNOT be reversed, i.e. the project cannot be moved to another workspace. Alternatively, the admin can remove the external person from the workspace and add them again. However, we would only recommend this if the external person has not yet been “used” often, e.g. if they have not yet been assigned to any or only a few tasks in the project, etc.

If you did not yet have an awork subscription and you have been added to a project as an external person, you will automatically receive the Basic Connect Plan for your workspace. This plan is free of charge and includes the same functions as the Basic Plan, with a few exceptions.

☝️🔐 Note: The data importer is currently not available in the Basic Connect plan.

You can have as many external projects as you like in your workspace with the Basic Connect plan, but only one project that you have created yourself. If you want to create another project, you have the option of starting the 14-day free trial version, which maps the Business Plan (Business Plan Features). You can then create a total of two projects of your own. After the 14-day trial expires, you can either book awork or go back to the Basic Connect Plan. The data, i.e. the second project you have created, will then remain in the workspace.

If you have already tested awork free of charge for 14 days in the past and now your external project is being shared with you, awork will ask you whether you would like to switch to the Basic Connect plan or book an awork subscription.

If you already had an awork subscription but it is no longer active, you will not be able to use the external project in the Basic Connect plan. You will then have to reactivate the subscription.

awork's standard search criteria apply to content from your own workspace that does not belong to external projects. You can find out more about this in this article.

External users can also find all content to which the user is connected from their own workspace based on their permissions. This means that content from external projects to which you have access can also be found here.

The workspace logo of the external person in my workspace is displayed at the bottom right of the person's profile picture.

All project members are able to see the external person.

If I have shared a project with an external person, I can:

If the external person changes a task status, for example, I will be notified as usual according to my account settings.

However, the following actions are NOT possible with external persons:

The following actions are NOT possible as an external person:

In projects with external users, you have the option of hiding entire task lists or individual comments from external users. This is helpful to maintain good internal communication without having to use other tools.
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To hide individual comments, you can simply activate the button with the eye icon in the comment field. When the button is active, it is displayed in red.

To make the comment visible to external users again, the comment can be edited and the button can simply be deactivated again.

To hide entire task lists from external users, simply click on the 3-dot menu of the task list and then on Hide list from external users.
You will then see a note above the list indicating that this list is now hidden from external users.

To make the tasklist visible to external users again, simply click on the 3-dot menu again and then select Show to external users.
The information above the task list that the list is hidden from external users will then disappear again.

Tasks can be completely hidden from external users so that only tasks for which the external user is assigned to can be seen.

Specify in the project-specific permission role that the external user have that he does not have any permissions to tasks.

The external user can then view the tasks to which they are assigned in the project via the “My tasks” tab.

The external user can also access these tasks via the My tasks task-filter.

In the general workspace settings, you will find the Connect menu item.

There you can find all external persons from your workspace at a glance, along with information about the project this person is involved in and when they were last active.

You can use the 3-point menu on the respective external user to:

You can sort and group this overview according to the following categories:

You can use the search field to search for users by name, email address, project or workspace.

The logo of the workspace in which the project was initially created is displayed at the bottom right of the external project image.

The External projects also appear as a menu item in the main menu on the left. All external projects are displayed below.

The external project is displayed in the main menu, in the project overview and in the dashboard filters.

☝️Hint: The project, the project tasks and the project members do NOT appear as search results when searching in awork.

If there are other external users on this project, I can view them all as an external person.

If I track time on the project or the project tasks as an external person, the tracked time belongs to the other workspace. I can see the time in the menu on the left under “Times”, but not in the time reports section.

As an external person, you do not have access to the workload section (business plan feature).

You can schedule tasks in your calendar, but this has no effect on the workspace in which the project was initially created.

As an external user, you can mention the other project members in the comments.

As an external user, I can only create a single project of my own, see above. I can create as many private tasks as I like but it is not possible to add other users to my private tasks.

An external person does not have access to the project settings.

Until now, you could add external persons as guests in awork. This will no longer be necessary with awork Connect in the future. You have the option of migrating existing guest users to external persons. You can find more information here.

In the Settings menu item, you now have the option of defining existing e-mail domains in your workspace. If a person registers with this e-mail domain at awork and this e-mail domain is stored in your settings, this person will be asked during the registration process whether they would like to join your workspace. This prevents people from the same company from creating multiple workspaces. They will be informed that there is already a workspace here that they can join. You can find more information here.

awork Connect can be tested in the free trial version. 🥳

If the workspace of the inviting user (of a connected project) has expired (either due to an expired trial version or a canceled subscription), the invited user will see an info badge with an info text in the project details.

Tasks and comments

The invited user can still create tasks and change the status of the tasks, depending on their permissions.

The invited user can no longer send comments at project level.

☝️ Important: If the original workspace is back in a paid plan, the info badge is no longer displayed and comments at project level are possible again.

You cannot invite colleagues to projects through awork Connect, as it is meant for collaborating with external users. They must have a license in your workspace. This restriction is based on the domain of the workspace creator. Are there valid reasons why you would like to invite your colleagues to your projects via awork Connect? Please contact our support for assistance. We will review your request individually.

The following actions are ONLY possible for users with a full awork license.

Advantages: Users with a full license can ...

No, unfortunately this is not possible.

They will receive an invitation by e-mail and will then be asked to register with awork and create their own workspace, in which the shared projects will then be displayed.

In the future, these will be completely replaced by external persons. At the moment, both options are still available. Existing guests can be migrated to external persons at any time, see here.

Yes, but they will only see themselves as a user and only the shared project and their own projects.

awork Connect is available to every awork customer, regardless of the plan. Nothing needs to be added and there are no extra costs.

Yes.

The external persons themselves cannot be selected as users in the automation, but they can be selected via the project-based permission role.

External persons are listed when creating integrations via our API and can therefore also be selected. They are also marked as “external”.

You do not see the person because they are not a fully-fledged user in your workspace. If you go to the settings in the shared project, you will see all project members there, with information on which people are external. The project-based permission role can also be adjusted there.

You cannot invite users with the same email domain to projects through awork Connect, as it is meant for collaborating with external users. They must have a license in your workspace. This restriction is based on the domain of the workspace creator. Are there valid reasons why you would like to invite your colleagues to your projects via awork Connect? Please contact our support for assistance. We will review your request individually.

You can invite external persons to any number of projects, there is no limit.

After inviting the person, an external project-based permission role can be selected, see permission management. An external person cannot be granted editing rights in the project details.

The times are tracked in the workspace in which the released project was initially created.

The external person will then see the time in the menu on the left under “Times”, but not in the time reports section.

No, this is not possible.

We can guarantee data protection because external users are not connected to the workspace, but really only to the project.

Invited users can only ever see the external project. The connection does not exist between the workspace and the external person. It only establishes a connection between the user and the external project.

What users can see or do within the project depends on the project-based permission role.

However, external people see tasks and times on their dashboard, filters etc. from the external project and also receive notifications as long as the connection is active, even though this does not belong to their own workspace.

You can invite external users, just like guests in the past, without making them part of your workspace. There are no costs involved.

This is possible if you book awork and thus one of the Basic, Business or Enterprise plans for a fee.

People who have editing rights for projects can add external people to projects.