Free version specific limitation in terms of users

@David Leal -

To answer one of your first questions, yes, people who you invite to collaborate on a board under the free plan will have full access to it to create sticky notes and other shapes. The limitations are with things like some of the add-ons, the ability to restore and backup boards, the ability to do high quality exports and the number of active boards you can have.

This help center article does a good job of summarizing the differences between the free and paid versions: https://help.miro.com/hc/en-us/articles/360017730373-Free-plan#h_01F32T0Z5SYEGWYVX81QRVNBCX

Kiron

thanks @Kiron Bondale for confirming that I can use the board with unlimited users contributing. I was trying to find some information on the Help section and I could not find a way to get some clarity about that.

About my other problem, I am assigned to an existing Team, per documentation you can leave a team and to create a new one. In my case I have already created a board, so I would like to keep that board. Reading the documentation, I can recover a board having the URL or link and then to restore it. Is it possible to follow this process when I leave a team? I don’t want to repeat the same customization I did for my board. 

Thanks,

David 

@David Leal 

About my other problem, I am assigned to an existing Team, per documentation you can leave a team and to create a new one. In my case I have already created a board, so I would like to keep that board. Reading the documentation, I can recover a board having the URL or link and then to restore it. Is it possible to follow this process when I leave a team? I don’t want to repeat the same customization I did for my board. 

You can port your board from the Free Plan where it currently resides by leaving the team you are currently a member of, creating a new team, and then opening an duplicating the board from the old Free Plan team into your new Free Plan team.

NOTE: You will have to leave ALL teams that your Miro account profile is a member of in order for Miro to prompt you to create your own Free Plan team. This happens because every Miro user/account profile is entitled to use Miro for free, so when Miro sees you are not a member of any team at all, you will be prompted to create a Free Plan team.

Detailed steps

1. Set the board’s public/non-team member access Share settings to Anyone with the link → Can view.
2. IMPORTANT - Save the board URL/link!

   

    

3. Leave the team (Team profile settings → scroll down, and Leave team)
4. When you do this, the board ownership will be transferred to whomever is the a Team Admin of the Free Plan team and who as been on the team the longest - usually ends up being whomever created the team.
5. Create your new Free Plan team.
6. Open the board that you want to duplicate - unless the new board owner changed the Anyone with the link access to No access since you started these steps, you will be able to open it in view-only mode.
7. Click on the board title and use the Duplicate button to create a copy of it in your new Free Plan account.

Nice… after I type all of that and make screenshots, I find the post I couldn’t find 15 minutes ago:

https://community.miro.com/peer-support-45/free-access-miro-board-5024

Thanks @Robert Johnson for your detailed response. Just to make sure before I do it. 

The first option: “Invite link to Board and Team” needs to have the value “No access”, correct?, I am sharing the configuration I have currently on my board before leaving the team. 

Thanks,

David

@David Leal - You’re welcome!

The Invite link to Board and Team setting won’t make a difference when it comes to duplicating the board later, but you still might want to leave it set to No access, to avoid it being shared by the future owner.

One other article I will direct you to is the one on Invitation Settings. With this option enabled in the team Permissions:

… you will then have the option of generating a link that the recipient will automatically be added to your Free Plan team:

And if I disable the Enable team invite link option, the above option disappears:

I like to point this out as sometimes people don’t understand that sending this link adds everyone that clicks it as a member to the team. While the Free Plan team allows for unlimited team members, if you host a large interactive session on the board and invite 60 people, they will now all be members of your team and will likely start creating boards of their own, quickly surpassing the 3-active board limit. If you do use the Free Plan to invite a bunch of participants, you will want to delete them from the  team right after the session!

Thanks @Robert Johnson  I was able to create a new team and to create a duplicate it to my new team. Thanks a lot!

Now on the new team, when I look at the share options in my board, I have the following options:

As you can see it is confusing because under the options for “Anyone with the link”, the option “Can Edit” is not available, it is supposed that people I invite to my board, are able to collaborate, per previous response from @Kiron Bondale. 

I followed you recommendation in Team Permission Settings I disable the option: “Enable team Invite Link”:

but as you can see from the first image of this response, I can see the option: “Invite to Team and Board” with the value “No Access”, per your previous response, this option should not be available under this Permission settings.

Please advise,

Thanks,

David

@David Leal - When @Kiron Bondale said this:

people who you invite to collaborate on a board under the free plan will have full access to it to create sticky notes and other shapes

The key word here is “invite”. When you you look at a Free Plan board’s Share settings, you see the word invite in two places:

Both of these method result in the invited person being added to your team, which is free compared to paid plans where you have to purchases paid licenses/seats.

The “Anyone with the ink” option is referred to as Anonymous Guest Editor access and is not available on Free plans - guests can only access the boards in view-only mode.

A note about the “Anonymous Guest Editor” feature. You are considered “anonymous” when you are accessing the board while not signed in to a Miro account - or you don’t have an account at all.

Invite to team and board

I have four Miro account profiles and and a member of about 15  teams. Upon further review, I see the behaviour is different between a few of my 5-editable boards Free Plan teams vs. the newer 3-editble board Free Plan teams - it looks like they have added the ability to enable the team invite link at the board level and will presumably remove it from the team level on the Free Plan.

Thanks again @Robert Johnson let me see if I understand it. My intention is to share the link in my Webex session chat for example so people attending the session can collaborate/contribute to the board I am sharing. What you say is that when they click on the link if they put a name and email, then they are not really anonymous, so they will have access to the board in edit mode, so they can contribute? Is it correct my assessment?

The link you shared: Anonymous Guest Editor access only mentions that the option Can Edit is not available for the Free plan, so the entire post if not for user like me.

If what I said in the first paragraph of this response is not correct, then the only option is to provide the list of emails, do I need to provide the emails separated by what? Why there is no contextual help to understand what is expected. How I do it with Slack?, When it says: “from the team”, the user needs to imagine you are talking about Microsoft Team even the wording doesn’t make you think Miro is talking about a product?

This is just a single screen with so many questions. it reminds me the book about UX: “Don’t make me think”, I know your role ir more as community manager and your are trying to do your best to help me, but it is really frustrating the effort the user needs to make to execute the main use case of the application: How to share a board with my team under the free version? I am sharing this feedback, because this is my first day trying to use the board, I was not able to use yet, because all of the confusion related about how it works for the free version. 

I really appreciate your help to overcome all the confusion about different options and Miro documentation generates. 

I would appreciate if you can confirm how exactly I need to proceed in order to share the board with my team so they can contribute. Can I use the link under Anonymous option in the way I explained before, asking my team to provide name and email or on contrary this option is not possible because anyway it is considered as an anonymous user (viewers under free version), so I need to collect all the emails using some separator so Miro can send them an email (I hope with the proper instructions on how to use the link provided).

Thanks so much for your help,

David

My intention is to share the link in my Webex session chat for example so people attending the session can collaborate/contribute to the board I am sharing. What you say is that when they click on the link if they put a name and email, then they are not really anonymous, so they will have access to the board in edit mode, so they can contribute? Is it correct my assessment?

With the Free Plan team, only team members can edit a board. In order to become a team member, one must have an account. If you send an invite link to a board (to edit) to someone, if they don’t have a Miro account, they will first need to go through the account creation process - enter name, email, password, confirm the account by receiving a confirmation email from Miro, etc. Surely you would not want to go through this in the middle of your session.

The link you shared: Anonymous Guest Editor access only mentions that the option Can Edit is not available for the Free plan, so the entire post if not for user like me.

Correct.

If what I said in the first paragraph of this response is not correct, then the only option is to provide the list of emails, do I need to provide the emails separated by what?

Emails are separated by commas. However, if you do decide to proceed with using the Miro Free Plan to host an interactive board editing session with a number of participants, you do not have to enter their email addresses into Miro. While it is true that only team members can edit boards that reside in a Free Plan team, you don’t have to invite them to the team and then the board. You can do this in one step using the Invite link to Board and Team option in the board’s Share settings. When you set this option to "Can edit" and use the “Copy invite link” button, a link is generated that, when clicked, adds the person to your team and allows them to edit your board. If they don’t already have a Miro account, they will first need to create one. To see how this works, you can test it yourself by opening the link from a private/incognito browser window. I will PM you a link to a board in one of my Free Plan team boards.

This is just a single screen with so many questions. it reminds me the book about UX: “Don’t make me think”, I know your role ir more as community manager and your are trying to do your best to help me, but it is really frustrating the effort the user needs to make to execute the main use case of the application: How to share a board with my team under the free version? 

You create a Free Plan team (which you have done), you then add members (either under Settings → Active users → Invite new members, or by using the “Invite link to Board and Team” option), and now all team members can see all boards in the team.

I would appreciate if you can confirm how exactly I need to proceed in order to share the board with my team so they can contribute.

I would use the “Invite link to Board and Team” option, set to “Can edit”.  Then use the “Copy invite link” button and send them the link well in advance, so everyone can have created a Miro account profile.

Can I use the link under Anonymous option in the way I explained before, asking my team to provide name and email or on contrary this option is not possible because anyway it is considered as an anonymous user (viewers under free version), so I need to collect all the emails using some separator so Miro can send them an email (I hope with the proper instructions on how to use the link provided).

There is no anonymity with the Free Plan as in order to edit a board, you must be a member of the team in which the board is located, and in order to be a team member, you must have a Miro account.

I hope this helps.

Thanks @Robert Johnson now it is clear to me that we have a path for using Miro free version for our purpose to start getting familiarized with the tool.

Basically the steps are:

STEP 1: Share the Board and take the link from the second option:

Note: Even you can select Can Edit from second option: Invite to team and board, when you unselected in Team Configuration->Permission

the link doesn’t get copied. So you need to make sure this option is enabled.

STEP 2: Then I need to share the link and to notify the user after they click on the link they will see the following screen:

STEP 3: and after selecting Sing up with email, the following form:

then finally following you recommendation, after the session ended in order to avoid other team members create additional boards and reaching the 3-boards limit, to remove them from the team.

Thanks a lot,

David

@David Leal - Glad to hear that it worked out! And thanks for sharing your details steps (with screenshots) for all of community members to see and understand in the future.

If the members you removed from your team were not already a member of some other Miro team, e.g., they created their account at the time they clicked on the link that you sent them, once you deleted them from your team Miro will prompt them to create their own Free Plan team. You could later add them back if you want to and remove them again, but at least they will continue to have their own team.

Tip for someone creating a new Miro account for the purpose of having their own team

One other tip I have for people creating a new Miro account is that during the account creation process, if they are presented with a list of teams that they may want to join, I suggest that they DO NOT try to join the teams and instead create a new team - they can then be added/invited to the other teams in the future. Why should they skip this step? Because they won’t have their own Free Plan team and will only be a member of the team they chose to join.

A Team Admin of a Free Plan team can disable this in the team settings:

When a team is Discoverable, anyone with an email address of the same domain will see something like this during the account creation process: