New feature: Board Content Copy Permissions

  • 30 October 2020
  • 7 replies
  • 14469 views

Userlevel 7
Badge +12

A few feature appears to be out of beta and has started showing up on various accounts, so I figured I would post about it.

The feature? I’m unofficially calling it: Board Content Copy Permissions.

As it turns out, I was close with the name. Here’s a link to the official Help Center article → Board Content settings

DISCLAIMER

  • I don’t work for Miro.
  • Everything I am sharing with you here is what I discovered today on my own (and I will surely get some of it wrong).
  • I have no idea when this will be available to other users or on which plan types.

In short, this feature lets the board owner specify who should be allowed to copy content from within your board or the entire board, i.e., Duplicate it.

The discovery
My spouse had this new feature pop up on her Education Plan today. What she saw first:
 

 

Clicking the Set permissions button took me to the Team profilePermissions page where there is a new Board content settings section at the bottom:

 

 

Note: From my testing in an Education Plan, only the Team Admin can modify these Permission settings.

I’ll come back to the options in a bit. First, some other things I found.

Back on her dashboard, the following popup GIF appeared:
 

 

From reading the description, this popup appears to be giving the current user the ability to enable this new feature on all of their existing boards in one click.

I did click it and was given the option to Undo:

 

This also caught my attention:

 

This reminded me of a Wish List Idea by @JeremyJ where he wanted to be able to copy a board form a URL. When I had read his Idea, I went searching the Miro Blog where I had seen sample boards in iFrames that, once loaded, the title of the board allowed me to open the Board details modal and Duplicate the board into my account ← this is what I was hoping this new feature would do. To test this theory I:

  1. Created a new board
  2. Set the board’s sharing settings to Anyone with the link → Can view
  3. And then opened the new Sharing settings

 

 

And then in the Permissions tab, I set the Who can copy board content to Anyone with the board access:

 

Next I copied the board link to my clipboard and went into another browser where I was logged into a Free Plan account that I have - one where that Miro account profile is not a member of the team where the board resides.

When I loaded the view-only board I saw this:
 

 

And when I clicked on the board name/title where I had the Duplicate button:

 

And after clicking on Duplicate, I received another option to choose the “space” (aka, account/team) where I wanted to Duplicate/copy the board to:

This was the exact same process that I could previously do with other templates, e.g., this Storyboarding template found on this page.

This is a great feature as now a whole board can be shared as a link rather than downloading a board backup, electronically sharing it, and the recipient having to upload it to their account.

The board content sharing permissions is only available to the board owner

If I am not the board owner, and the board has not been shared with me at the board level, I do not see the Sharing settings option at all:

 

If I am not the board owner, but it have been shared with me, I see Sharing settings:

 

But when I open this, I do not have the Permissions option:

 

But if I am the board owner, I will always have the Sharing settings and Permissions tab:

 

What about the other options?

What I discovered about the other options (and a possible use case):
 

 

#1 - Anyone with the board access -  As I just showed, anyone with the link and a Miro account can copy the whole board to their account.

Use case: You can now share a board with another Miro user by just sharing the link.

#2 - Only team members - I set a board’s sharing setting to Anyone with the link → Can edit and shared the board with another user as a guest editor for a collaboration session, however, the participants will not be able to copy the board to their account.

Use case: Perhaps you are delivering paid training and the board is not included in your client contract.

I also tried setting the board to:

 

And as a Team member with View-Only access, I could still Duplicate/copy the board:

 

Use case: The board owner is working on the board and doesn’t want other team members to modify it, but still wants them to be able to make a copy of it.

The Duplicate option is also available from the dashboard view:

 

#3 Only team members with editing rights
For this permissions setting change and the same board as before (Team access to the board still set to Can view), but now only team members who can edit the board can only Duplicate/copy it, therefore the board title is not clickable, i.e., I can’t get to the Board details modal where the Duplicate button would be:

 

And the Duplicate option is gone from the dashboard view:

 

And as one last test, I was added as an editor at the board level:

 

And now the duplicate options are back:

 

 

#4 Only board owner

With this set, only the board owner can Duplicate the board.

Use case: The board owner doesn’t want anyone else in the world to be able to copy this board!

One last setting to test: Copying board content ← who can do this 

Where the setting is found: Team Profile settings → Permissions → Board content settings → Copy board content

Whether I have just gone too deep into this for one day or I’m tired (or both), this took me a bit of thinking to wrap my head around it.

This setting appears to control whether or not members outside of the team can Duplicate/copy the board content.
 

Who are “users outside this team”?
Guest viewers/commenters/editors or Occasional collaborators (Day Pass consumers).

So, if the team Admin does not want any board content to be shared outside of the team, they can set this option to Only team members - this includes the team admin!

But if they set the option to Team members and users outside of the team, then the option of Anyone with the board access will be available.

Here is what all the permissions options that team members (including the Admin) will see in both scenarios:

 

And finally, in case you’re wondering, if the permissions set to Anyone with the board access and then the admin changes the setting to:

 

Then the permissions default back to Only team members:

 

What I learned from all of this testing:

  • I will not be turning this setting on for all of my existing boards and will explicitly enable it on boards that I want to share.
  • I will set the Copying board content option to Team members and users outside of the team because I already have a use case for this.

A few use cases I see so far:

  • Quicker sharing of a board.
  • Sharing a board to a Free Plan user!
  • Sharing a board on a public whiteboarding template site, e.g., Boardle.io by @JeremyJ 

Do you want to try this out?!

I already used this today when someone asked me for a copy of my Getting to know Miro template that I created as my entry into the Miro 101 Templates Challenge on the forum. When people have emailed me and asked for a copy of the board, I had to export the board as a .rtb file and email it to them and they had to import the board into their account.
 

With this new feature, all anyone (even a Free Plan user) has to do is

  1. Open the board
  2. Click on the board title
  3. And click the Duplicate button.

Give it a try if you’d like → https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_kgq7sig=/

 

Some questions I still have:

  1. Will this be available for all plans or paid plans only? (I suspect paid only)
  2. When will it officially be announced/released?
  3. Does Miro have plans to add even more detailed permissions, e.g., limit content copying by object-type (documents, images, etc.)?

Finally a few questions for all of you:

  1. What do you think about this new feature?
  2. What use cases do you see for it?
  3. Is there something else you’ve found that I didn’t mention here?
  4. From what you’ve seen so far, is there already something you think it’s missing?

Thanks for reading all of this!


7 replies

Userlevel 6
Badge +4

@Robert Johnson I'm as astounded as I am impressed. This is a deep dive that the world didn't know it needed.

Userlevel 5
Badge +1

@Robert Johnson   :clap_tone3::clap_tone2::clap_tone5::clap_tone1: :clap_tone4:

Miro should pay you to do their feature rollout updates.  This is phenomenally helpful and your writeup saved me HOURS of figuring all this out solo.  You are a hero.

Userlevel 7
Badge +12

While I was replying to a post on the forum which involved this new feature, I realized that a potential risk has been introduced and thought I would share this here.

Here is a use case where the new content copy permissions have created a risk for users who:

  1. want to continue to allow board participants to download a file from a board, e.g., a worksheet for the training they are in, so they have to set the new permissions to Anyone with the board access to copy content,
  2. but they don't want the participants to be able to make a copy of the entire board to their own Miro account!

E.g.: A consultant delivering paid training on a board that contains custom templates they do not want copied. With this new content copy permissions feature, the above scenario is no longer possible. Therefore, you would need to share files with them another way, e.g., Google Drive or OneDrive.

The post that brought this to my attention:

https://community.miro.com/got-a-question-ask-the-community-45/downloading-docs-pdfs-etc-2915

Userlevel 4
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Hi @Robert Johnson, thank you for the great review! 

By the way, the feature has been recently rolled out on all Miro accounts. FAQ section of the Help Center article includes one more workaround for the case described by you. :) 

@Vlada - Robert just helped me with another issue related to this one (thank you @Robert Johnson ) and I wanted to share some additional feedback about these new settings.

I’m a professor and I was using a class Miro board to share downloadable lectures and assignments with all of my students.

Our admin utilized the new sharing settings to prevent the students from copying board content (the entire board to their own account, for example) which makes total sense, but now my students cannot download content from their class board.

This completely changes the functionality of the board for my students. I’m fine with restricting copying or entire boards for students, but want access to downloads to be available. I wanted to share this feedback because controlling copying and download settings together doesn’t work well for this situation (similar to what Robert mentioned above). I see in the Help Center Article you shared with Robert that there is no way to easily do this (see below) without the admin fully changing the settings for our whole team. If they do this, I can just change the settings for each board anyway, so it’s not really a work-around. 

  1. I want my board guests to download files on the board, but I would like to restrict their ability to duplicate the shared board to their account. How can I achieve this?
    - At the moment, the two settings cannot be configured separately. However, as a workaround, you can create a separate board with the files and enable the ability to copy the board and content on it.
    You may also embed the board with the files on the original one - this way your board guests will always have access to the files. To embed the board, copy the board embed code following this guide and paste the code as an iframe widget on your main board.

Thank you for letting me share this concern! I love how quickly the Miro team responds and reacts to this type of feedback.

Userlevel 4
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Hi @Challie Schafer 
Thank you so much for sharing your feedback - I’ve passed it along to the Product team. The team hasn’t shared their plans regarding further development of the feature with me yet, but I hope we’ll get a chance to distinguish the rights of copying boards and downloading board content. 

Userlevel 7
Badge +9

@Robert Johnson :

WoW!!! You’ve done an incredible work with all of your screenshots and detailed description.

Thank you for your work!!! :clap::clap::clap:

And thank to the Product team and to all others at miro. You’re mironeers are awsome!!!

Michael

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