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Issues with user management and access once a plan was purchased

I’ve been working with MIRO free version already for some time with my private email.

Recently I also created a MIRO account with my work email. Shortly after, the owner of the company I currently work at purchased a MIRO plan.

 

Recently I started to observe a few different problems:

  1. My private account (on my private email) without any notification or anything is now part of the organisation. I had a couple of my boards there and now they are part of the team account.
    1. Why is that? I wasn’t added, Wasn’t invited? The only thing I could have done was potentially open a team board with that account (not secured link).
    2. When I try to remove myself from the team, I get an info that all the boards will be assigned to the team (it’s also described here I believe - https://help.miro.com/hc/en-us/articles/360026524453-How-to-Leave-a-Team). But all of them are mine. Why is that? How can I work around it?
  2. Despite my boss creating the account, the team and paying for the plan, without any notice both my emails (private and work one) became admins. My boss is not an admin anymore, but continues to receive notifications about the upcoming payment, but e.g. cannot manage the users.
    1. I can transfer the rights to him no problem, but this shouldn’t have happened in the first place
    2. more importantly, if my private email suddenly became an admin, then that means that any visitor (e.g. client with whom we share a certain project board) could also potentially become an admin. This is a big deal
  3. We share some of the boards with our customers. They then also share it with 3rd parties.
    1. Why each such account is added by default to the pool as a team member?
    2. Not only they might get more access than they should have, but also, I assume it counts into the bill we pay for MIRO.

Additionally, considering what I described in point 1 above, I don’t know if e.g. when I remove our clients/3rd parties from the team, then suddenly their private boards that they might have will suddenly become part of our team AND they might lose access.

 

To be clear - our team has the “invitation only” setting turned on in the permissions.

 

Maybe we/he did something wrong. Maybe it’s a matter of some settings. Would be great to get some insights and help how to address point 3 and how I should deal with point 1. Additionally, all things should not be happening this way by default, so I imagine some fixes are seriously needed.

 

Thanks a lot in advance for any help,

Mateusz

 

11 replies

Robert Johnson
Userlevel 7
Badge +12

@Mateusz Hajnysz - Thanks for the detailed information - this is very helpful. However, without knowing exactly all of the steps that were taken leading up to where you are now, I will still need to make a number of assumptions.

I just wanted to note that whenever I mention “Team settings”, I am referring to the “Team profile” settings section, found by clicking this button:

 

A quick note about Miro roles in a Free Plan team:

  • Team Admin
    • The default role give to the person who creates the team.
    • There must always be at least one
    • There can be more than one.
    • Only the Team Admin can delete users from a team - both Team Admins and Members.
    • Only the Team Admin can promote/demote team Members.
    • Team Admins can Leave or Delete the team.
  • Member
    • All new users added to a Free Plan team after the team was created (by the Team Admin) will be given the Member role by default.
    • Members can only choose to Leave a team.
    • A team Member can upgrade a team plan.

Rather than my trying to answer your questions in the order you have provided, I am going to chronologically step through what I have believed has happened along the way, providing additional context when relevant.

I suspect that

  • You created a Free Plan team using your private email - you are the Team Admin role.
  • You later created another Free Plan team using your work email - again, you are the Team Admin.
  • You added your private email, i.e., Miro account profile, to your work Free Plan team and made this new member a Team Admin.
  • You added your boss to the team, but did not grant him the Team Admin role.
  • You like added others to the team--whether you added them from the  Team profile → Active users screen or invited via a board link, but for now we’ll assume there are three active users: Your private and work email, and your boss.
  • Your boss upgraded the Free Plan team to--again, an assumption--a Team Plan team.
  • When your boss did this, they remained a team Member, but are considered the Billing Admin as their email address will be listed on the Team profile → Billing page.
  • Once the team was upgraded, all roles remained the same.
    • You mentioned: ‘My boss is not an admin anymore’ - again, he likely never was as roles are changed when a team/plan is upgraded.
  • If you haven’t already, you should promote your boss to Team Admin:

     

 

Adding Team members vs Sharing board’s with your customers

There are only two ways for people to access Miro boards:

  1. As a team member
  2. or a Guest

#1) Team Members

In order for a someone to become a team member, they will require a paid license seat on a team.

HOW to add new team members to your Team Plan team

There are three ways that I know of:

  1. Team profile → Users → Invite new members

     

  2. From a board’s Share settings:
  3. Copy invite link button

     

Using any other those above methods will result in your clients being added to your team and consuming a paid license/seat.

WHO can invite new members using the above methods?

Team Admins, always. Team Admins can also increase the team size, so if you were to continue to invite your clients to edit boards using the above methods, you will continue to increase your team size - you will also likely allow them to see the boards of other clients in your team.

More Control over who can add new team members

Go to Team profile → Permissions → Invitation settings:

I suggest that you set the following:

 

NOTE: Even with the above settings, I believe that,

  1. If you have any unused/unallocated paid  licenses
  2. and any team member invites a non-team member/client to a board using the the following option:

    … then the person they added will become a team member - you as a Team Admin, however, will likely be notified that someone was added to the team.

How to work on boards with clients without being charged AND without them being added to your team?

Easy: Guest Editor access - adding a password is optional.

A Miro account is not required to view the guest editor/public access boards.

 

NOTE: If you only want your client to view a board, and they have a Miro account, then you can add them directly to the board as “View” or “Comment” only and they will not consume a license AND they will not see any other boards in your team. They will appear in your list of Users as a “Free”, “Non-team user”:

 

Default Board & Project Sharing Settings

To avoid everyone in your team seeing every board or Project that is created, you may wish to set the following:

Team profile → Permissions →  Sharing settings

 

What happens now if that anytime you create a board or project, only the person creating it will see it - they will be “private”.

Example:


 

 

My private account (on my private email) without any notification or anything is now part of the organisation. I had a couple of my boards there and now they are part of the team account.

 

If you had boards in your private email’s Free Plan team, but your boss upgraded the Free Plan team that you created using you work email, then the boards would not have moved between teams on their own.

Perhaps you are in the wrong team’s dashboard at the time and are mistakenly thinking they are in another team.

  • When this happens, what email address /Miro account profile are you signed into Miro with?
  • What teams do you see are currently attached to that Miro account profile? E.g., I have ten teams attached to my Miro account profile that I can switch between by clicking on them:
  • When you open a board that you expect should be in your private email team, and then click on the board title to open the Board details window, in which team does it say the board is located? E.g.:
  • And finally, who are the active users in that team? Those are the people who can see your boards:

     

If you are going to be working with external clients, and do not want to use public/guest editor access, and you are currently on the Team Plan plan, then I would suggest the Consultant Plan instead. This plan allows for you to create unlimited teams within your plan, so that you could put client-specific boards into their own team and invite your client to that team - now you would be confident that your client can only see the boards that are in that team. NOTE: Creating new teams within a Consultant Plan is a bit different - see this post for more:

https://community.miro.com/ask-the-community-45/consultant-plan-can-t-add-members-and-not-create-additional-teams-1887

 

Let me know if you have any more questions or if I missed something.

Visual Thinker | Volunteer Community Moderator
M

@Robert Johnson - thanks so much for an elaborate response. It’s really useful.

But at the same time I feel like all this should be much more intuitive (I mean how the app behaves in different situations).

I feel like not all of your assumptions are right, which is understandable - you can’t predict everything ;)

First of all, I think when I first created MIRO account, it wasn’t necessary to have a team created. Only at some point I might have been asked to create one. If it was necessary to create a team from the beginning, then something even stranger had to happen, because with my private email I started creating boards before I started working for the company I’m working with at the moment, so there’s no way I would have a single team in my profile named with the name of the company I work for at the moment. Moreover, this was the only team that I was in (as I really believe it wasn’t originally needed).

Also, at no point did I ever go to team settings. At all. So there’s no chance I could have made my work email an admin. 

So there’s a lot of craziness that happens automatically in the background in the app, which is strange.

 

Anyway, at this stage

  1. I removed my private email from the team. No surprise, my private boards were taken away and assigned to my work email (bad, but somewhat expected).
  2. So I added my private email back to the team and added my private email to the boards that were originally my private ones.
  3. From my private email account I
    1. duplicated those boars
    2. created a random private team
    3. moved the duplicated boards to the new team created (in which only I’m in).
  4. At this moment, on my private email account, I only have 2 boards - the private ones I retook.
    1. Surprisingly, they are in a “view-only” mode I can’t do anything with them.
    2. It tells me that I’ve reach the free team plan limit and only the 3 most recently created boards would be editable. but that doesn’t make sense
      1. the 2 most recently created boards are the ones I duplicated and took to my profile
      2. moreover, I only have 2 boards. 

any ideas on how to proceed with this one?

Robert Johnson
Userlevel 7
Badge +12

@Mateusz Hajnysz

I feel like all this should be much more intuitive

Agreed. I only know as much as I know as I have dug in quite deep and am currently a member on about ten different Miro teams, covering 4/6 plan types.

Without conducting some form of forensic investigation--which Miro support could only do--I will a few more scenarios as to what may have happened.

First, every Miro account profile--short perhaps of an SSO/provisioned account, e.g., Enterprise Plan---must be bound to a Plan/Team.

If someone with no Miro account goes to miro.com/signup and creates an account, they will end up with a Free Plan team, e.g.,:

 

And when I go into the Team profile settings:

 

So let’s say you created a new account and your own Free Plan team. Now there are two Miro account profiles (by email address) and two Miro Free Plan teams.

And then we add each other to our teams. When we look at our dashboard, we would see two teams:

 

And what happens far too often is people click “Create board” in Team B when they thought they were in Team A.

Another scenario…

I had my my Miro account with my allotted one Free Plan team, but you had no Miro account.

I then send you a “join” link to my board and team, you click on the link, Miro carries over that context of being invited to my team, and as you complete the signup process, instead of being prompted to create your own Free Plan Team, you are added to my team. Now we both only see my team when we are signed into our Miro accounts:

 

Trying to create your own Free Plan team

And when either you or I click on the Add teams icon on our dashboard, we are prompted to create a paid team - this is because Miro sees that both of our Miro account profiles are already attached to team, and it doesn’t matter if it is a Free or Paid plan, or if I created it or you created it - our profiles are attached to a plan, so that’s good enough for Miro.

 

 

And then we are taken to the page where we choose our paid plan:

 

Now, if you wanted your own Free Plan at this point, you could leave the Team (or I delete you) and then Miro would see that your profile is not attached to any plan and would prompt you to create your own Free Plan team. And if I would have made you a Team Admin, then you could have kicked me off of the that team and I would be prompted to create my own Free Plan team.

Signing up with a private domain (e.g., not Gmail.com)

Something else that happens is that you may instruct someone to signup for a free Miro account, but when they are going through the signup process with the @company.com email address, if anyone using that same domain has a Miro plan configured (Team profile → Permissions → Team signup mode = “discoverable”) then Miro will present them with this list of teams. If they choose to join one of those teams, then now that is the only team they will see in their dashboard and they won’t be able to create a Free Plan team of their own. In this example, if they want their own Free Plan team, they should click Create a new team:

 

Back to your questions…

I am reading your current scenario and still need a clear visual of what is going on (screenshots with any personal info being redacted would really help).

When you sign into Miro with your private email,

  1. How many teams do you see on the left-hand side of your dashboard?
  2. Are you on the All boards screen?
  3. Is “Owned by anyone” selected?

 

Next, when you click on the Team profile button, what do you have here?

 

Visual Thinker | Volunteer Community Moderator
M

@Robert Johnson - again, thanks a lot for the help and time devoted. Much appreciated.

As far as your questions regarding my view on my private email account are concenred:

  1. at the moment, I only see 1 team - the one that I created after I (my work email) kicked myself (private email) from the work team
  2. Yes, I’m on the ALL BOARDS screen
  3. Yes, “owned by anyone” is selected

at this point, I only see 2 boards and they are labelled “view only”.

  1. In the team profile I have
    1. Current plan: FREE
    2. Total boards: 2 (2 locked)
    3. Total members: 1

 

Robert Johnson
Userlevel 7
Badge +12

@Mateusz Hajnysz - You’re welcome!

This behaviour of not showing the locked boards is ringing a bell. Something similar happened to me years ago when Miro was still RealtimeBoard and I upgraded my Free Plan to the Professional (now Consultant) Plan and then let the plan expire - I ended up with a lower than expected allotment of editable boards in my Free Plan team and locked boards in my no-longer-accessible paid plan.

One last thing to try before we engage Miro support: Sing out of all Miro account profiles and then back in. Does that free up your locked boards?

Visual Thinker | Volunteer Community Moderator
M

@Robert Johnson  - did that (signed out from all my accounts) on all devices and in all browsers I might have used in the past few months. After logging in to my private account, still the same “view-only” and 2 boards locked situation.

Robert Johnson
Userlevel 7
Badge +12

@Mateusz Hajnysz - I have converted this post into a support ticket. You should have received an email confirmation of this. 

Visual Thinker | Volunteer Community Moderator
M

@Robert Johnson  - thanks so much again for your help!

Do you have access to this ticket or would like me to get back to you when I get something from support?

Robert Johnson
Userlevel 7
Badge +12

@Mateusz Hajnysz - You’re welcome! I do recall now that this happened to another user and I believe the end result was some manual intervention by support.

I don’t have access to the ticket, so if you could pop back here and update us all with what support tells you, surely this will help someone else in the future.

Tips:

  • The post link will be in the initial ticket
  • You can also find the ticket (and any others created under your profile) by going to https://help.miro.com, clicking on “Sign in”, and then “My activities”.
Visual Thinker | Volunteer Community Moderator
M

@Robert Johnson and anyone else who might benefit from that in the future… below you can find the answer I got from Miro Support:

 

According to our systems, the two boards located in your team have a Private status, which is understandable since they were moved from a paid team. When the board is transferred from a paid team to a free account, it becomes inactive because it was created as private when on the paid plan. Since board privacy is not supported on the Free plan, the board gets locked and available for the board owner and explicitly invited users for viewing only.

To unlock your boards, you need to share them with your team. That being said, please select the Can edit option in the Team access to board section:
mceclip1.png

Please, let us know if the issue persists, and the boards are still locked - then our team will investigate this case further. Also, feel free to ask any questions that might appear. I am always happy to help!

 

So what I did, for both boards I clicked on the 3 dots and from the menu I picked “share” and then in the “team access to board” i picked “can edit”. Now both boards are unlocked.

@Robert Johnson - if I missed any crucial information while describing the issue to you at any point earlier and made this unnecessarily longer and more complicated - sorry for that. I hope it was only a new thing that we learn each day 😉 In any way, once again thank you so much for all your help. 

All the best!

Mateusz

 

 

Robert Johnson
Userlevel 7
Badge +12

@Mateusz Hajnysz - Thanks for sharing the support team’s response. I can’t believed I missed that one!

I suppose there are a number of ways in which Miro could have made the experience better (for all of us):

  • The use of “VIEW-ONLY” and “Locked” - pick one and use is consistently. “Locked” would have been a better word to use as not even use as the board owner could edit it.
  • They could have switched the board’s Team access to “View” when the board was moved to a Free Plan as “No access/private” boards are not allowed.
  • They could have warned of this scenario when moving the board to a Free Plan team - here is the only message I receive when I moved a “private” board to a Free Plan team:


    The yellow highlighted text was not true in this case as only you could see it.

if I missed any crucial information while describing the issue to you at any point earlier and made this unnecessarily longer and more complicated - sorry for that. I hope it was only a new thing that we learn each day

No worries at all. There can be a lot going on in Miro in the background and with all of the flexibility comes a seemingly endless number of scenarios.

Cheers!

Visual Thinker | Volunteer Community Moderator

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