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The Collaboration Hub allows working with external stakeholders, such as customers, contractors, or partners on TaskRay projects alongside internal team members. It allows adding external stakeholders to project teams, assigning tasks to them, and collaborating with them every step of the way directly in TaskRay.
In this article, we outline the process of using the Collaboration Hub, including how to prepare data and how to add external collaborators to project teams. For reference on how to set up the Collaboration Hub, refer to this article: Collaboration Hub: Configuration Guide.
Review how to prepare data and use the Collaboration Hub in this interactive guided tour:
Collaboration Hub Internal User Permissions [Admin]
External user access is managed via the External Access tab within the Project Detail modal. If you do not see this tab, reach out to your internal TaskRay Admin and share the resource on setting up permissions for this purpose.
Internal users need to be members of the site and have one of the following permission sets assigned in order to see and use the External Access tab within the Project Detail modal:
- TaskRay - Project Manager Access
- TaskRay - Admin Access
Prepare Data for the Collaboration Hub
Before you can start adding external collaborators to projects, there are a few steps that must take place to properly prepare data. For this purpose, every applicable TaskRay project must be related to an Account where the external collaborators are added as Contacts. This is a 1-to-1 relationship where each applicable project is related to an Account for the respective group of external collaborators.
To summarize:
- For every external collaborator, it is necessary to have a Contact record. The Contact record must have the name and email address specified.
- The Contact record should be related to the applicable Account.
- The Account should be related to the TaskRay Project where the external collaborator is planned to be added to the team.
Sample Configuration
To illustrate, let's take a look at a sample configuration. In this example, we'll use a customer onboarding use case where a TaskRay project is used to manage the implementation process for the Acme Organization. For this purpose, an Acme Account record is set up in Salesforce and it is related to the implementation TaskRay Project. All relevant external stakeholders are added to the Acme Account record as Contacts.
With this configuration, it becomes possible to select individual external collaborators to add to the project team through the related Acme Account Contact list.
Configuration Details
Accounts & Contacts
As noted previously, TaskRay references Contacts on Accounts to set up external users and grant them access to projects via the Collaboration Hub. That being said, it is necessary that relevant Account records are created in your Salesforce instance and all applicable external collaborators are added as Contacts to their respective Accounts.
Typically, this is done either as part of the Sales handoff process or the Customer Success Management process outside of TaskRay. However, we recommend confirming this before you start adding external users to projects.
For the Collaboration Hub, external user Contact records must have names and email addresses filled out. Contact email addresses are leveraged as usernames for external collaborators and are necessary for setting up access to the Collaboration Hub.
For more information on how to set up Accounts and Contacts, refer to the following Salesforce Help articles: Accounts and Contacts.
TaskRay Projects
The other portion of the configuration is to relate TaskRay Projects to Account records. Out of the box, TaskRay includes the Account lookup field on the TaskRay Project object. This field can be used to establish a link between TaskRay Projects and relevant Account records, which will allow selecting individual related Contacts to be added to project teams as external collaborators.
Typically, this is incorporated into the project creation process. This means that projects are automatically related to respective Accounts when they are created (for reference, the following articles outline two main approaches to automating the project creation process Automatically Clone Templates Using Flow or Automatically Stitch Projects Using Flow). If that is not the case in your organization, then the relationship can be manually updated by editing the applicable TaskRay Project and populating the Account field.
Internal Only Tasks
TaskRay provides the ability to designate tasks on projects as internal only. As the name implies, internal only tasks are visible to internal TaskRay users, but they are not surfaced to external collaborators, such as in the Configuration Hub.
If you would like to restrict visibility to certain tasks, use the Internal Only checkbox on those TaskRay Task records.
For detailed information about this functionality, refer to the following article: Internal Only Tasks.
Working With External Collaborators
Add External Collaborators to Projects
Once all the data is properly set up, you can start adding external collaborators to project teams and assigning tasks to them.
To add an external collaborator to a project, follow the steps below:
- In TaskRay, navigate to a project where you are looking to collaborate with an external stakeholder and open its Project Details.
- Within the Project Detail modal, click on the External Access tab.
- Here, you will see a list of related Contacts that can be added to the team. In the External Contacts without Access section, select the Contact(s) that you would like to add to the project team and click on + Add to team.
Note: If you do not see a Contact that you expect to see, start by reviewing Contacts on the Account related to the project. From there, confirm that all applicable Contacts have an email address specified.
When external collaborators are added to the team, they will receive an email notification to set up access to the Collaboration Hub.
Assign Tasks to External Collaborators
After the external collaborators are added to the project team, the next step is to delegate work to them. For this purpose, you can use the Dynamic Team Builder and follow the same process as you would for assigning work to internal team members.
If you need to assign one-off tasks to external collaborators, you can refer to the following article: Assign Task Owners.
Work With External Collaborators on Projects
Process
After the external collaborators are added to project teams and assigned tasks, they can start managing assignments and collaborating on projects with internal team members.
External collaborators will be managing assigned work in TaskRay through the Collaboration Hub. For a summary of what the process looks like for external collaborators, refer to this article: Collaboration Hub: External User Guide. We also recommend sharing this guide with your external collaborators for reference.
As for you and other internal TaskRay team members, the process of managing work on projects with external collaborators will look the same as usual! In other words, you and other team members can assign tasks to external users, collaborate using Chatter on projects and tasks (if enabled for the Collaboration Hub), and follow the usual processes to manage TaskRay assignments.
Chatter
If using Chatter to share updates on projects and tasks, there is one important item to consider for external collaborators. When adding a Chatter post, you will have the following options:
- Internal organization (name of your org) only: This will make the post visible to internal users.
- All with access: This will make the post visible to everyone who has access to the record. This includes internal and external users.
When adding Chatter posts, make sure to select the right option to make the updates visible to applicable audiences.
Wrap Up Projects With External Collaborators
As the work on projects reaches completion, the final step is to make sure that the projects are properly closed out. This is an important step in the process as it controls external user access to the Collaboration Hub.
This final step of the process depends on the specific configurations applied to the Collaboration Hub by your organization. TaskRay provides the following options for this step: removing access when the projects are marked as complete and/or when they are archived.
For details on your organization's specific process to properly close out projects with external collaborators, confirm with your manager or TaskRay Administrator.