Understand the Structure

Why did we design Shade this way?

When we started Shade, we wanted to build a system that was intuitive to the experiences that we are all used to (like Google Drive or Dropbox), but also had the capabilities of modern productivity software like Notion and Figma. The Shade structure is defined to allow for a large amount of flexibility in how you’d like to structure your teams projects and work. You also have the ability to easily manage inheritance levels between members and guests.

Shade is designed to be a file system solution that not only offers superior search capabilities, but also a premium experience when it comes to managing external collaborators, team members, and assets.

What are Workspaces?

Workspaces are the core component of Shade and is the central location in which you unify you, your team, your projects, and your assets.

Simply, a workspace is a collection of drives and users. This is the “team” where you add members that will be involved in multiple projects.

Users can be added to a workspace with the following permissions:

• Workspace Admins - those who can add additional members, control billing, and view usage details
• Members - those part of the core team who can easily access multiple drives

Members have added benefits of easily managing and accessing a variety of drives, being able to create new drives for themselves and for the team, and invite guests to specific drives or folders.

Workspace admins have flexibility in managing a variety of different drives, including editing associated details, changing locations and more.

Why do we have workspaces?

Workspaces allow us to unify users under one team and have multiple drives connected to one workspace. This allows for two things

• It makes it super easy to manage permissions across drives
• You can view billing across an entire organization
• Security and audit logging of activity across all files and assets across an organization is unified

What are you billed for?

You are billed for your total storage usage above your free amount and the number of seats in your workspace. Any members or admins that are added at the workspace level are a billable seat of Shade.

What are Drives?

Drives are the level where you can house different sets of assets. You can create a drive per project, per client, per shoot, or however you choose depending on you and your teams workflows. Our recommended solution is to choose a drive per client, and separate out folders for projects and shoots. This allows for maximum permission control, easy revokation, and access expiration for external collaborators and workspace members.

Users can be added to a drive with the following permissions:

• Drive Managers - A drive manager is a workspace member or workspace admin that actively manages who can be invited to this drive and what permissions are inherited from the workspace
• Full Access - Able to create shareable links and shareable modifications on files and folders
• Editor - Able to edit and move files and folders within the drive
• Commenter - Able to comment and approve of files
• Viewer - Able to view files but not comment

Drives house files and folders that can be chosen to be AI indexed, however all files and folders will be fully text searchable.

Managing Your Team

There are important elements to properly securing your workspace and understanding the different roles that are at play.

Understanding Workspace Admins and Members

Workspace admins have the most access within the Shade ecosystem. They are able to manage drives (create, update details, delete drives), add and remove members, view audit logs, billing details, and view all guests that are associated across all drives and workspaces.

Members have the ability to create, update, and delete drives that they are drive managers of, and view the guests that are associated with the drives of their choice. Members can also add additional members to the workspace.

Drive Managers and Guests

Permissions for drives works on an inheritance basis. If you have access at the workspace level, then you will inherit the access for the associated drive. Similarly, if you are a guest at the drive level with specific edit permissions, then you inherit those edit permissions for all files and folders within that drive.

Drive managers manage drives and their permissions. Specifically, they are able to revoke guest permissions, change the inheritance edit permissions of workspace members, and view audit logs for the associated drive.

Guests are any external clients and collaborators you wish to invite to the drive or a specific file or folder. Guests are a non billable unit but the total number of guests are limited by the workspace plan. Each guest has specific edit permissions defined during invitation and can be modified by a workspace member or admin.

Inheritance for Permissions

Inheritance lies at the core of the Shade permissioning structure. As mentioned before. If you are added at a higher level (i.e. at the workspace or drive level), you are automatically inheriting the role and edit permissions of that higher level for any lower levels (like a file or folder). This makes it easy to manage permissions in groups, and declaratively assign permissions relative to the level that the member or guest is added at.

Examples

Now that we get the basic structure, let’s go through a few ways that you could set you and your team up.

I’m an individual just getting started, but want to be able to share a few things with some people.

This is great! When you sign up with Shade, you automatically get your own personal workspace. This personal workspace allows you to choose to share with individuals at the workspace level or at the drive level. First, I would create a personal drive that you would like to use for your work. Then, I would invite your friends and collaborators as guests of that drive to then allow them to collaborate with you. If these are one off occurrences, then guests are perfect. If however, you know that these guests will have access to multiple drives and projects, it might be a good idea to create a team workspace and invite them as members.

I’m a videography team and I have 15 clients, how should I organize my team and assets with Shade?

Managing clients and your internal team can feel frustrating with existing technology. With Shade, this is straightforward. First, if you have not already, create a workspace for your team and invite your team members to that workspace. Your team members will inherit specific permission levels and can be grouped together into various user groups for easier permission management. We would not recommend adding your clients unless you believe they will access multiple drives.

External clients should be managed and handled as a guests in Shade. Guests allow you to explicitly provide specific types of access and control at the drive, folder, or file level. Depending on how you might work with your client, you might separate out their projects by folder and have drives specific to each client. Alternatively, you can structure each drive as a new project and share each drive with a guest.

I’m a large 500 person company, managing multiple projects, spanning from a variety of different departments and groups, how should I work with Shade?

As a small to mid sized enterprise, or even larger, we understand the need for security which is why Shade for enterprise is designed around SSO/SAML support. There are a few ways to manage Shade depending on your requirements and needs.

We recommend first signing up with Shade and create a team workspace where workspace can govern as the entire company’s workspace. You can connect SAML/SSO through the workspace settings - using Shade’s easy SAML application authentication along with your existing identity provider such as IdP.

Once this is set up, it is important to restrict permissions. For example, in the workspace settings, you can set default inheritance permissions to be None or View-Only for workspace members. This ensures that core types of drives, no matter who creates them, will have specific access relative to specific groups or members.

Shade offers views to see who has access to resources, when they got access those resources, and where those files are located. This is useful for audit logging, legal, compliance, and more.

Once drives are created, depending on their location and permissions, you will be able to easily transfer data between departments. We recommend setting up an “Archive - General” drive that enables anyone across any department to access stock elements, general brand kits, and more so that your team is unified and can search one central repository of data.