blog / Private collections: personal and subteam sync within teams

When we launched screen.garden to everyone about a month ago we committed to putting all our effort into following up with two features: file sync, where images/video/whatever can sync through screen.garden, and what we called subteam organization, where you can create collections that only you—or a few people you choose—can see, even within your larger team. I’m happy to report that the file sync work is continuing apace and that the subteam work, now called private collections and groups, is here!

When creating a new collection you now have the option to choose who, exactly, can see it:

Here I’m creating a collection called My private notes with the privacy set to just me—that means that even if I’m on a team with other people, only I can see, edit, and sync the notes in this collecton! You can also create named groups of team members and create collections that only those groups may access. Here’s me on the web, structuring collections for a software company:

This enables a lot of powerful setups:

• You could have a team for your family of three (now only $4/month!) with a single collection of family-wide notes plus private collections for each family member.
• You could use screen.garden to power your business, where every employee has their own personal notes, their department notes, and a collection of company-wide notes.
• You can create a private collection of, say, travel notes and temporarily grant access to a trusted person while you’re traveling, then revoke that access when you return.

Anything you can model with these three levels of privacy and groups of users you can set up as a system of synced notes. And, as always, notes are synced in realtime, conflict-free, and allow fine-grained collaboration with live cursors.

We’ve updated our features page to relfect that we’ve shipped this, and are so excited to bring you even more features soon. You can try out collection privacy by signing up for screen.garden and creating or editing a collection, and you can create groups of users in your settings.

As always, you can always get help at [email protected] or by joining our Discord.