Overview of sharing permissions on objects

Last update: December 10, 2024

CREATED FOR:

  • User

When sharing an object with someone in the system, you can grant the recipient any of the following permissions: view, contribute, and manage.

You do not have to be an Adobe Workfront administrator to share permissions on objects that you have access to, but your permissions on objects work within the access levels set by the Workfront administrator.

You can share or remove permissions to an object you created or an object that was shared with you. When you are not the creator of the object, you must have Share access on the object that you want to share in your access level in addition to Share permissions on the object. For information about access levels, see New access levels overview or Access levels overview.

NOTE
A Workfront administrator can add or remove permissions to any items in the system, for all users, without being the owner of those items.

Objects that you can share in Workfront

You can share the following objects in Workfront with other users:

Considerations about sharing objects

  • You can share only the same level or a lower level of permissions you have on the object.

    For example, if you have Contribute permissions on the object, you cannot grant another user Manage permissions on that object.

  • You cannot share an object with a permission level higher than the access level of a user.

    For example, if a user has View access to Projects in their access level, you cannot give them Manage permissions on a project.

  • A user with permissions to at least View an object can share that object with someone else.

  • You can share objects with active users, job roles, teams, groups, or companies.

    NOTE
    You can share a plan or a goal only with other active users. This requires additional licenses.
    For more information see:

  • Workfront sends notifications to users when you share an object with them. Notifications go out when both these settings are enabled:

    The system- or group-level settings must be enabled first, before you can enable the notification settings for the user.

Share limitations

You can share an object with up to 100 entities (users, teams, groups, job roles, companies). We recommend that you share objects with groups, teams, or companies rather than with individual users to avoid this limitation.

Share permissions for objects

The following table illustrates the level of permissions that you can select when sharing an object. Not all objects have all these settings available. You can grant another entity permissions to View or Manage an object. If you are sharing a project, task, or issue, you can also grant permissions to Contribute to it.

View

You can perform the following actions on the object:

  • View the object

  • Add documents to the object

  • Add issues to the object (if it is a task or a project)

  • View Finance information about the object

  • Share the object

    When you share the object, you can grant other users the same permission level you have only on the object, not a higher level.

Contribute

You can perform the following actions on the object:

  • All the actions included with the View permission.
  • Add Expenses to it
  • Add tasks to it (if it is a project)
  • Edit Custom Forms on it
  • Log Hours on the object
  • Make assignments in it
Manage

You can perform the following actions on the object:

  • All the actions included with the View and Contribute permissions
  • Delete it
  • Manage Finance information in it
Make this public to external usersAnyone without a Workfront account can view the object by clicking a link to it. This is not available for all objects.
Make this visible system-wide

The object can be found in searches and viewed by users with a Workfront account.

Note: Users with Contributor or Requestor licenses cannot see projects, even if this setting is enabled.

Understand inherited permissions and the hierarchy of objects

Permissions inherited from parent objects

Permissions in Workfront are inherited hierarchically. This means that if you are granting permissions to a user on a parent object, they gain the same permissions on the children objects associated with it by default.

For example, if you give a user Contribute permissions to a project, the user has Contribute permissions to all tasks and issues (child objects) associated with that project.

Continuing with the example above, you cannot restrict permissions to child objects. If you do not want the user to have Contribute permissions to child objects associated with the project, you must manually remove the Inherited Permissions from the objects and then adjust the permissions for the individual user, including any Advanced Settings.

For more information about the hierarchy and interdependency of objects in Workfront, see the section Interdependency and hierarchy of objects in the article Adobe Workfront objects overview.

NOTE
Your Workfront administrator can disable inherited permissions for documents in your access level. For more information about disabling inherited permissions for documents in the access level, see Create or modify custom access levels.

Permissions acquired through organizational memberships 

If you grant Manage permissions to a Group of users on an object, and you grant View permissions to an individual user in that Group on the same object, the user has the highest level of permissions (Manage) granted through the Group membership on the object.

If you want to grant lower permissions to a user who is already part of an organizational unit (Group, Team, Job Role, or Company) with a higher permission level, you must remove the permissions from the organizational unit, and add users individually with a lower level of permissions.

Share an object

For information about how to share objects, see Share an object.

Remove permissions from objects

For information about how to remove permissions from objects, see Remove permissions from objects.

Request permissions to objects

When someone sends you a link to an object which you do not have permissions to View, or when you have lower permissions on an object and you want to request a higher level of permissions, you can request permissions on the object.

You can request access to an object from anyone who has Share permission to the object.

For more information about requesting permissions to objects, see Request access to objects.

More help on this topic

Previous pageGrant and request permissions to objects
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