Invite your team

Bringing someone in takes two steps, in two places, and knowing which is which saves a lot of confusion.

1. Put them in the organization. That happens at the Bookbag account, because the organization is shared by every Bookbag product.
2. Give them workspace access. That happens in Openbook, because which of Openbook's spaces a person can reach is Openbook's business and nobody else's.

Step 1 — add them to the organization

1. In Openbook, open Organization → Members & access.
2. Click Manage members at Bookbag account. That opens your organization's page at the account service.
3. Add the person's email address and choose their role: owner, admin, member, or viewer. Roles and permissions explains what each one means.

Everything about membership is decided there: adding and removing people, changing a role, transferring ownership, and re-sending an invitation that got lost. Openbook keeps no copy of the member list, so there is nothing to keep in sync and no second place for the answer to be wrong.

If they already have a Bookbag account with that email, they are added straight away and your organization appears in their account. One account can belong to several organizations.

If they do not have an account yet, the invitation is held as pending until they register with that address, at which point they join your organization automatically.

Pending invitations match on the email address. If someone says they signed up but does not see your organization, the usual cause is that they registered with a different address than the one you invited. Check the pending list at the account service and invite the address they actually used.

Step 2 — give them workspace access in Openbook

Back on Organization → Members & access in Openbook, use the workspace access form:

• Email — the person you are granting access to.

• Access level — Full access (read and write) or Read only.

• Scope — all workspaces, or only the workspaces you select.

• All workspaces — the person can reach every space in the organization, subject to each space's own visibility. Right for regular employees.

• Selected workspaces — only the spaces you pick. Right for contractors, clients, and anyone who should see one project and nothing else.

Scope and organization role combine. A contractor can be an organization member at the account service and still be scoped to the single client space you picked here, seeing nothing else in Openbook.

Viewers are free

People with the viewer role — and guests — are always free and never count as billable seats. Openbook counts a seat as an organization member whose role is anything other than viewer.

That changes the calculus on who to invite: there is no cost reason to leave stakeholders out. Give executives, clients, and adjacent teams the viewer role so they can follow the work without pinging you for status.

Guests are narrower still

A guest is not a role. It is a flag on top of viewer-shaped permissions that scopes a person to the specific rooms you invite them to. You invite one from a space's Settings page.

A guest cannot see a room they were not explicitly added to, even a room whose visibility is set to everyone in the space. That is the difference between a guest and a viewer: a viewer can read the whole space, a guest can read the rooms on their list.

Two things to know before inviting one:

• A guest must already have an account. Guest scoping hangs off a real account, so if they have not signed up yet you are told to ask them to, and then invite them.
• Guest invitations are always read-only. Any permissions in the invitation are ignored and replaced with read access to the named rooms.

Giving a guest a normal workspace role later is the only way out of guest status, and it ends it completely.

Tips

• Invite early. Don't wait until the workspace is "ready". A space with real teammates in it fills up with real work; a space you're polishing alone stays a demo.
• Invite before people sign up. Pending invitations attach automatically at registration, so you can add your whole team's addresses in one sitting.
• Default to viewer. When in doubt about whether someone needs to write, start them read-only — it costs nothing and you can raise their role later.
• Use selected-workspace scope for outsiders. A client scoped to their own delivery space can work fully there without ever seeing your internal spaces.

After they join

New members land in the organization with the role you chose at the account service and the workspace access you set in Openbook. From there:

• They see the spaces their scope and each space's visibility allow.
• Inside a space, their workspace role — owner, admin, member or viewer — decides what they can change. A space's owner or an admin sets this from the space's Settings page, and the person is notified when it changes.

See Roles and permissions for what each role can do.