Collaborate-Tool-ManageWP

Collaborate With Your Team and Clients in ManageWP Orion

Collaborate-tool-managewp

My password mantra is a volatile combination of paranoia and laziness: I distrust password managers like LastPass, and I don’t write them down anywhere. At the same time, I use the same set of passwords on a lot of websites, so I won’t forget them.

This is why I don’t like giving away my passwords.

I talked about the Manage Users tool and the need to periodically change passwords and usernames on your WordPress websites. After all, if you’re running a team, you’ll have multiple people logging into your ManageWP account. You want to make sure they can’t jeopardize years of hard work. Today I’m gonna talk about the Collaborate tool and how to let your team members and clients access your ManageWP dashboard safely.

Collaborate With Your Team

You’ve got people on your team managing your websites. You want to give them access to all ManageWP tools, so they could get things done quickly and efficiently. Here’s what you need to do:

  • Hover over your account name at the top right.
  • Go to the Collaborate Icon.
  • Enter the team member’s email and access level (you’ll probably want full access on all websites).

managewp-add-collaborator-all

An email invitation will be sent, together with a password setting URL.

Collaborate With Clients

Client collaborators are a bit different from team collaborators. They only need to see their own WordPress websites. You might also choose to give them read-only access, to keep them in the loop without the fear of them breaking something. The invitation process is the same as with the team members, with one difference:

  • When choosing the access level, pick read-only if you want your clients to look, but not touch. Use full access if you’re not afraid to let your clients go wild.
  • Pick the tags & client labels corresponding to that client. Your client will only see those websites.

managewp-add-collaborator

A cool feature at the bottom of this page is the website counter: as you change tags and client labels, the counter will change to let you know how many websites that collaborator will be able to access.

What Can ManageWP Collaborators Do?

They can:

  • Access your ManageWP dashboard
  • Access your websites
  • Use all your ManageWP tools (full access only)

They can’t:

  • See or change your login password
  • Access your account settings
  • Access the billing page
  • See or edit other collaborators

managewp-manage-collaborators

Improvement Over the Classic Sub-Users Tool

Classic users know this tool under a different name: Sub-Users. We decided to rename it into Collaborators because of the shift in our philosophy.

So, here is what we came up with.

Made for clients, as well as team members

One of the main features you kept requesting was the ability to share ManageWP tools for certain sites with your clients. Now you can. Just pick the right tag and/or client label, and they get to access the corresponding websites (and only those websites). Please note that if you choose multiple tags or clients, your client will see all the websites that have at least one of the selected tags or client labels.

Collaborators don’t need a separate account

The collaboration system has been redesigned. When you send an invite, a special collaborator account will be created for that person. Once the collaboration is over, you can simply close that account.

If at any point that person decides to create her own ManageWP account, she’ll simply be asked upon login if she’d like to go to her own dashboard, or to collaborate on yours.

Separate settings and notifications

Collaborators get their own notifications, news, and settings. They won’t interfere with your work, and vice versa. This is pretty sweet because everyone can set their own time zone, among other things. If you collaborators have their own ManageWP accounts, they’ll use their own settings everywhere.

Separate history

History will identify who did what, and be able to show it in the Client Report.

Further Development

We kept it simple and practical, and now we need your help: can you think of an upgrade for the Collaborate tool? Let us know in the comment section, and I’ll be happy to discuss it.

Nemanja Aleksic Avatar

31 responses

  1. stephen@steedokc.com Avatar
    stephen@steedokc.com

    Okay, here’s my proposed upgrade to collaboration, and the plugin upgrade workflow.

    I would love to hire a fairly inexperienced employee to keep all of our sites updated, and to let me know if anything is broken. The problem is that the person doing the updating might not know what the site is supposed to do, or what it’s supposed to look like. They can look for obvious problems, but some are going to slip through the cracks.

    Here’s how I wish it worked:

    1. I log in to Orion. I hit the “Update All” button.
    2. As each site is updated, a series of predetermined, automated tests are run to make sure it’s still working correctly.
    3. If the tests fail, Orion tells me, and asks if I would like to roll back to the last update made before the update.

    Here are a few examples of types of tests that would be helpful:
    – Screenshot before and after the update – Red flag if the screenshot is significantly different than the last screenshot.
    – Test for the presence of keywords – Red flag is you get “404”, “500 error”, etc.
    – Test for the absence of keywords – Red flag if front page doesn’t contain “Argyle socks”, etc.

    Ideally, what I’m really asking for is for you to integrate something like Ghost Inspector (https://ghostinspector.com) into your product, to automate the testing of updates. But something much simpler than that would still be very helpful.

  2. geraldjim Avatar
    geraldjim

    Firstly, the collaboration tool is a great idea and looking forward to trying it.

    I would also like to second Stephen request for a way to verify that sites are still working correctly. Even though we have the update all function in the dashboard we still need to check each site manually. When you have quite a few sites to mange this is a very time consuming activity and almost defeats the purpose of having an update all button.

    Well done

  3. David Avatar
    David

    Will collaborators have access to ManageWP Classic too? I can foresee my collaborators needing to add new sites and that still can’t be done from Orion. Thank you

  4. blogjunkie Avatar
    blogjunkie

    Hi, I would like to strongly disagree with Stephen and GeraldJim. If everything is automated, then clients would simply subscribe to ManageWP and not have to engage WordPress professionals to manage their sites. And to Stephen and Gerald, your customers are paying you for your service so I think it’s not too much to take the time to check in on their sites. Thank you

  5. ellegaard Avatar
    ellegaard

    This is great! But I’ll have to dig a little deeper before I can see, how I can use it in my business. But thank you! 🙂

  6. james@viralwolf.com Avatar
    james@viralwolf.com

    Awesome news! This tool looks great, can’t wait to try it out. You guys are doing a fantastic job with all the new features over the past few months. Excited to see what’s next. I especially like the recent addition of an uptime monitor. Thanks again

  7. Robin Avatar
    Robin

    I just added my first client-collaborator and I’ve been waiting for this functionality! Yay for the team! One thing I would like to see added is the ability to view/customize the email sent to them. I know I’ll get a phone call within the hour asking me what it is for…

    Will we be able to white-label the ManageWP dashboard for client collaborators?

    Keep up the awesome work!

  8. paul@awaken.studio Avatar
    paul@awaken.studio

    Why is it that I don’t have anything under client access if I want to invite my clients to view their own websites?

    https://gyazo.com/2cb63840c2a1236b57ef0d2cca1f237b

  9. admin@lammworks.com Avatar
    admin@lammworks.com

    Looks great. However without the white label option, its not really relevant.

  10. info@evotis.be Avatar
    info@evotis.be

    In the classic version we loved that you could make new users within wordpress and assign them to specific sub-users. That way it’s easy to see who did what and the name of the author would show up on the article. It’s also extremely helpful to create new wordpress users in bulk when you have a new employee and you want to assign over 50+ sites to him/her. In this new version that doesn’t seems to be the case?

    Another great feature of sub-users was the possibility to restrict access to one IP address. That way we where sure our workers could only login from the office. Will this feature also disappear?

  11. james@viralwolf.com Avatar
    james@viralwolf.com

    When adding a new collaborator, it would be nice to be able to select which sites they have access to, without having to set it by tag or client name.

    For example, I want a new collaborator to have access to four sites.. this means I need to first go create a new tag, then tag those 4 sites, then come back to collaborate tool to set it up by the tag.

    Lastly, when I want to remove one of the four sites access from that collaborator… I removed the tag from the site, however that collaborator still has access to the site! It didn’t remove access.

  12. btrilli Avatar
    btrilli

    How is the whole Sub-User/Collaborator going to work after the transition to Orion tomorrow?

    The reason I ask is because we have sub-users setup 2 ways. Everyone who needs to work on any of our sites have created a ManageWP account. The great majority if not all of them are free accounts. From here there are 2 groups, Technical people who need access to all of the Managewp back-end and site admin features(Use all ManageWP tools, except billing for all sites) and those who just use it to access specific website as specific users(Open admin on my sites and set the username to login as). This approach allows us to only give admin access to those who need it and limit the permissions of specific sub-users related the the role of the user on the wordpress site. This works great for such cases because I don’t want to give everyone the permission to run updates or access to add and remove users, etc…

    From my simple testing, it seems like sub-users with the setting “Use all ManageWP tools, except billing for all sites” actually get logged into orion as the main Managewp Classic user. Which seems like it could have some possible security problems/headaches in the future if they are not removed from the old sub-user tool and added as collaborators once the switch is made. But everything still technically works the same as before so that is minor. The real issue I have right now is related to the sub-users set to “Open admin on my sites”. Since these users are free accounts I am unable to switch to Orion and see how the sites are all integrated for the. Also there is no option to assign a username to a user in collaborate. So it seems like when it transitions from classic to orion for these free users they will lose access to all the sites assigned to them. Or I will have to add them as collaborators and lose all permissions because at that point they will have the same access to the sites as the main Managewp user.

    So how will it really work, how should it work, can I still achieve the same setup I have and if so what do I need to do to achieve the desired setup I currently have?

    Thanks in advanced

  13. info@wpvoorgo.nl Avatar
    info@wpvoorgo.nl

    Hi,

    I have 2 managewp accounts.. in classic they were linked together. But it seems that i cant do this anymore in Orion, is this correct? Or is this the same function but now named ‘add collaborator’? (im trying to link my 2 seperate managewp accounts with all their own sites together, just as i could in classic)

  14. junglewp@gmail.com Avatar
    junglewp@gmail.com

    Hello guys, do you forsee a whitelabel option for the clients area ? It would be great to show to clients that their websites are in good hands, but we want to have a branded interface.

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