The Acrobat.com Blog

It has been almost a week since we launched Workspaces with Acrobat.com – along with a whole host of other updates for sharing, collaborating on and managing files online. The response and feedback has been great – thanks!

As a project team leader, there a number of people from Adobe, from external agencies and from other partners that I need to collaborate with on documents in a Shared Workspace. Fortunately, a new capability in Acrobat.com’s file organizer makes it easier for me (and you) to manage all those team members.

When you are viewing a Shared Workspace in your Acrobat.com file organizer, you will see a new “Show Members” button in the top right of the main organizer window.

Click that button, and a complete list of all Shared Workspace members will open in a panel at the bottom of the file organizer.

You can also open that list by clicking on the collected group of members in the Collaborator bar at the bottom of your browser window.

Let’s take a look at what you can do from here to manage your team mates, assuming you are the owner of the Shared Workspace or have been allowed to administer it. You have similar options when it comes to sharing and collaborating on files, but we’ll review those another time.

Who Are You, and What Have You Been Up To?

Hover your mouse over a Shared Workspace member, and in addition to their name and email address (which is their Adobe ID for their Acrobat.com account, by the way), you can also see if they are the Owner (that’s you, if you created the Shared Workspace – there can only be one Owner), or an Administrator; if no role appears, they are regular members – more on roles for Shared Workspaces and files in Acrobat.com another day. Additionally, you can see if they have accessed the Shared Workspace or not, and if so, when was the last time that they did. Here you can see that I need to have a word with Conrad about his contributions – or lack thereof – to my project…

I can change the role of an individual team member for the Shared Workspace: there is a pop-up context menu for an individual when you hover over their name. Click that, and you can give or take away their Administration rights, or remove them from the Shared Workspace entirely. But what if I need to do that for more than one team member?

Team Management En Masse

The Shared Workspace Members panel also allows you to control all team members at once. In the top-left of the panel is another context menu. From this menu you can:

• change the role of all members to Administrator or regular member
• add additional members to the Shared Workspace – new members will see the Shared Workspace in their Acrobat.com organizer and all the files within without you having to add them to all the files individually;
• copy the member list for use in another existing or new Shared Workspace (this copies their email addresses so you can use that elsewhere if you wish to);
• email all members (Acrobat.com uses your preferred email client for sending the email message);
• remove all the members. [wish I had a command like that for the last house party I hosted]

Finally for this tip, you can also search for members from this panel. Take a trip over to the top-right of the members list, where you can type in a search term to filter the list on. The text you enter can be member names or email addresses. For example, you can type in the domain name for an agency you have been working with on a project to just show those members from that company with email addresses matching that domain.