Effortless Collaboration: Introducing the New MeisterTask Guest Role

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It’s been one of our most asked-for features… and now it’s here! Legions of loyal MeisterTask users requested a solution to help them work better with external collaborators, and with this latest update, we’ve delivered. The new feature – guest roles – gives project admins the opportunity to share specific tasks without granting access to the entire project. In this post, we’ll look closer at how it works.

Effortless Collaboration: Introducing the New MeisterTask Guest Role

We spend a lot of time talking to the millions of MeisterTask users worldwide about the features they’d most like to see. Then, from thousands of requests, we carefully select improvements that will make our tool better for everyone. Sometimes though, making a decision is simple: few features were requested more than an improved solution for working productively and securely with external partners. In basic terms, the question was this:

Can we see an easy way to collaborate with users on certain tasks without sharing the entire project?

You know the drill. You’re working on a project with a freelancer, such as a graphic designer who is designing a new logo. Or you need support from another team within your organization to complete a specific task. Until now, you could either invite these people to the entire project – revealing all your project’s data – or create a new project, an inefficient workaround.

Generally speaking, the desired level of collaboration would be as follows: the external collaborators should be able to contribute towards your project goals, but they should not have access to other confidential data within the project..

Our Solution: the Guest Role

Our solution to the issue, the guest role, is a new dimension of project roles and permissions, available to MeisterTask Business and Enterprise users. 

This update enables you to manage project access granularly, on both a task and project level, which has benefits across the team, especially in Agile workflows. Your collaborators will be able to communicate with one another without a “middle man” thanks to comments, mentions and the like, but the guest will not be able to view information on the tasks they are not specifically requested to be working on.

Find out more on roles and permissions in our help center.

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Guest Role for MeisterTask Business & Enterprise

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Be our guest!

Guests can only access tasks they are assigned to or watching.

If you’ve been watching MeisterTask closely, you’ll have noticed that you can now assign five different roles within a project. Project admins can set roles and permissions at any time from the Project Properties menu. You are already familiar with administrator, member, commentator and read-only: the new guest role is right in the middle between member and commentator.

Once assigned to a task or added as a watcher, project guests can access task features similar to a project member. This means they can:

  • Edit the task description. 
  • Add/manage checklist items.
  • Add/manage attachments.
  • Communicate with the whole team using comments and mentions.
  • Reassign the task.
  • Complete the task.
  • Add the task to their Agenda.

However, the guest cannot:

Access Tasks as a Guest 

We’ve simplified the entire workflow for project guests. Whenever a guest is assigned a task or mentioned in a task, they will receive a notification with a link to the relevant task. Guests can use the filter in their personal MeisterTask Agenda to display any tasks that have been assigned to them or in which they have been added as a watcher. Guest tasks will be displayed with a blue guest header for quick and easy access. 

Guests Can Stay Focused

From the guest’s point of view, this type of collaboration has many advantages. Anyone added to a task as a guest will only see the information relevant to them, as opposed to a full project board, which significantly reduces the potential for confusion. As ever, the clean, simple look and feel of MeisterTask means that even first-time collaborators can get up to speed on the necessary information in no time. This increases productivity and optimizes any workflows that incorporate external service providers.

Up to date with all the newest features in MeisterTask? Find out which updates you may have missed.

Using the Guest Role

Many users of this feature will be companies who cannot and will not share information freely with people outside of their team or organization. The ability to define access to project data on a task-by-task basis is a useful tool for data protection, essentially preventing project data from being intentionally or unintentionally shared or changed.

Handle projects securely

Selective access to tasks in MeisterTask

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Once you have pinpointed the task that the collaborator should have access to, you can quickly invite them as a guest to the project, then assign the task to them or set them as a watcher. After that, the guest has access to the task and collaboration can begin. If you work with MeisterTask Basic users, projects in which only “guest” permission is granted do not count towards the three projects available in the Basic subscription.

If you’ve been assigned the guest role in a project and need help accessing your assigned tasks, take a look at our dedicated help center article.

The rights of a guest are also temporary: If the guest is removed as a task assignee or watcher (either by another team member or by the guest themself), they lose access to the task. If the task is trashed or archived after completion, any guests are also removed. This means that you always have control over a guest’s access level, all with little administrative effort.

Better Communication, Better Collaboration

Our latest development is good news for project teams: the guest role allows you to integrate third parties into your projects while keeping workflows smooth and efficient. As a bonus, communication between the team and external collaborators is also significantly improved. 

We hope you enjoy working with this new feature as much as we do: this is what modern task management should look like!

Work smoothly with external partners

Guest role for granular task management

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