Controlling access to specific boards within a project for project members

@Roger Wheeler -

It sounds like if you’d add learners to the project with no access and then individually control access at the board level as required that would meet your needs? 

Kiron

Hi @Roger Wheeler. From what I have learned lately about Project/Board permissions, in most cases Project permissions override Board permissions. There is a short video clip on the Projects help article that outlines the Users → Projects → Boards hierarchy.

From my recent testing of Project/Boards permissions (outlined in this post), I don’t think you will be able to accomplish everything in the ideal flow that you have described.

One thing I would be curious for you to confirm is: In your set up, in order to keep Boards to being visible only to those students/members in the Project/course to which said Board were added to, did you have to set ALL Board-level Share access to: Team access to board → No access? (That is tricky verbalize without a specific example!)

And finally, back to your list:

There will be 13 boards per project (a course is 13 weeks long).  I want to:

(i) allow editing of the board for the current week for all project members during class time;

(ii) change the edited board to “view only” immediately after class (to preserve the class results);

(iii) make boards for future classes (that are under construction by me) invisible until a later date.

One solution--while extra steps for you and doesn’t solve all of your concerns--would be to create a temporary/prep Project for each course, e.g., “PREP_Course A” and then leave yourself as the only member of that board.

There will be 13 boards per project (a course is 13 weeks long).  I want to:

(i) allow editing of the board for the current week for all project members during class time;

You would move the board from the temp/prep Project to the active/live Project where the students are working from.

(ii) change the edited board to “view only” immediately after class (to preserve the class results);

Unfortunately, this does not appear to be possible. I was initially going suggest that you try to Lock all objects within the board (Ctrl + A to quickly select all and the “lock” all), but from my testing, any user in the Education Plan can unlock objects (← I think I will add this as a Wish List item - a board-level permission to only allow a Board Owner to unlock objects.)

Depending on how big your board is, you could save a copy of the completed board to--yet another Project tagged as “completed”--and then put an image/screenshot/PDF of the board back in the active project, so the students can view it. Or, save a completed copy as a high quality PDF and share it with your students.

(iii) make boards for future classes (that are under construction by me) invisible until a later date.

This would be covered by keeping the Boards in a temp/prep Project.

As an educator with this specific need, I would suggest adding this as a Wish List item following the guidelines here: Wish List: Everything You Need to Know. If you do add it, please post a link to it back here and you’ll have my vote!

According to the Help Center article on projects (https://help.miro.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018262033-Projects):

“When you invite a project member, you can set their role (editor, commenter or viewer) for all boards in the project at once. Their access rights to a specific board can then be changed via the board's Share menu.”

As such, it should be possible to set limited permissions at a project level and elevated permissions on a board-by-board basis within the project.

Kiron

@Kiron Bondale My test conditions are as follows:

• Three members walk into a Team: Member 1, 2, 3
• Member 1
  • creates Project A and leaves Anyone in your team can view this project set to OFF.
  • adds Member 2 to the project with Can edit access. 
  • creates Board A and sets share access to: Team access to board to No access.
  • creates Board B and sets share access to: Team access to board to Can view.

Resulting behavior is as follows:

• Member 1 and 2 can see and edit both Board A and Board B.
• Member 3
  • Cannot see Project A
  • Cannot see Board A
  • Can see Board B, but in View only mode.

Unless I am doing something wrong, either the information in the Projects help article is incorrect or the permissions model between projects and boards is not working as designed.

Are you able to confirm anything different?

Note: I did this in the Education Plan, however, I suspect the same behavior for any other paid-type plan, with perhaps the exception of the Enterprise plan.

Good morning @Kiron Bondale and @Rob Johnson.  Many thanks for the speedy replies!

@Kiron Bondale - I agree that (theoretically) it seems like a straightforward task to control board access within a project, given the way the guides describe access/permission settings.  Thanks for bringing my attention to the relevant settings. But Rob has found (through his experimenting) the same results I was getting.  Clearly, the help/guides are somewhat inaccurate on this topic.

@Rob Johnson - your analysis/experimentation confirms that I’m not just a being newbie/dunce w.r.t. board access/permissions (phew!).  I will do as you suggest and “Wish List” the seemingly simple idea of individualized board access/permission within a project for project members.  In the meantime, I will do as you suggest: create a private “Prep” project for boards under construction and create screenshot/PDF for completed boards for display/viewing after class … which unfortunately removes the functionality of all links to external resources that I wanted to endure … sigh.

Thank again guys.  REALLY appreciate your help.  Cheers!  R.   

@Roger Wheeler Thanks for confirming that I, too, am not losing my mind. I had to re-read the documentation shared by @Kiron Bondale a number of times and triple-check my test steps.

@Marina - Would you be able to forward this post along to someone at Miro whom looks after help articles to update the wording of the article? From what we have learned here (and in this post), the statement in bold does not appear to apply to members of a project to which a board belongs to and has been causing some confusion:

When you invite a project member, you can set their role (editor, commenter or viewer) for all boards in the project at once. Their access rights to a specific board can then be changed via the board's Share menu.

@Rob Johnson - I have posted a wish list item on this topic - and you beat me to alerting Marina to the misleading help statement.  Thanks again.

I forgot to answer your question from earlier … yes I do have all board permissions set to “No Access” for the team, in order to prevent students in one project (their own course) from seeing what’s happening in other projects (someone else’s course).

That is unfortunate @Roger Wheeler & @Rob Johnson that this doesn’t function the way the help article reads  . We are on a Consultant plan and hence are able to achieve the type of segregation of access that you’d want by using distinct teams for each class and then providing board-specific access to individuals.

Kiron

Hi all! Vlada from Miro Support team here.

I am extremely sorry that the Help Center article used to contain the incorrect wording! We have changed it to the following:

When you invite a project member, you can set their role (editor, commenter or viewer) for all boards in the project at once. Their access rights to a specific board can then be increased via the board's Share menu.

Thank you for pointing this out! The thing is that project and board access level complement each other and work at the same time: it is the role with maximum access that takes effect. 

Vlada, this is counter-intuitive, and it’s disappointing that the Miro support team response is just presented as a mere help-center wording fix, without further reflection as to what UX makes the most sense.

Per the standard UX across other digital products -- the access set at the individual board level should OVERRIDE the project access level. If you’re presenting and allowing granular options to reduce access for that individual board, it makes ZERO sense to then discard those user customizations for that specific board and continue to blanket-apply to it the project level access setting. (I mean, think of the metaphor of an apartment building… that’s like saying all people who have keys to the building can enter an individual apartment despite the lock on that apartment’s door.) 

TLDR; It is NOT standard in RBAC design anywhere to have “the role with maximum access that takes effect.” 

There’s really 4 levels in Miro here and their inter-relationships is really confusing in both the help documentation and the Share modal itself: board, project, team and company.

A few screenshots (from the same board) to illustrate that it’s clear as mud. (Note, this is the Mac desktop app, I’m on an Enterprise plan, and I’m trying to manage group access to a board, rather than an individual member’s access).

Just a lot of contradictions and confusion, and lack of clarity all around, that goes beyond help documentation. Very frustrating.

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