Teams and roles

Teams and roles control which documents each person's answers can come from. A team stands for a group of people, such as Sales or HR. A role is a level inside a team, such as Intern or Manager. You then restrict documents to a team, or to certain roles in it, and only those people get answers drawn from them.

Teams and roles are about documents only. Which experts a person can talk to is set separately, on their row on Members.

Where to find it

Under Access in the PEOPLE section of the sidebar you will see two related rows:

Teams & Roles is where you create teams and roles and decide how roles relate to each other. Its page is headed Teams & Roles.
Manage teams, indented beneath it, is where you put people into teams and give them roles. Its page is headed Manage teams.

Plans. Creating, changing and deleting teams and roles, and putting people into them, needs the Professional plan. On Business both rows are dimmed in the sidebar with a note about this. Nothing already set up is switched off if a plan changes. Your access rules keep applying, and you can still take people out of teams from Members. Admins other than the owner also need the Manage teams & roles permission. See Account types.

How access works

The rules are short, and worth reading before you build anything.

If your workspace has no teams, nothing is restricted. Everyone can get answers from every document their expert can use.
A document you have not restricted is open to everyone, even once teams exist. You can change that with the Hide untagged documents from non-admins tick on the Knowledge Base page. That tick only appears once you have a team, and it asks you to confirm, showing how many documents it would hide. Switching it needs the Professional plan and the Manage teams & roles permission.
A document restricted to a team can be used only for answers to people in that team.
A document restricted to a team and to certain roles can be used only for people who hold one of those roles in that team.
A person in no team can use only the documents that are not restricted.
The owner and your admins are never limited by teams. They reach every document.
A document's own restriction replaces the one on its folder. They are not added together, so you can restrict one file more tightly than the rest of its folder.

Restricting is done on Restrict documents and on the Knowledge Base page. See Restricting documents.

Creating teams and roles

Open Teams & Roles.

Click Add team (or Name your first team if you have none). A row opens with Team name, e.g. Sales and First role (optional).
Type the name and click Save. Save & add another keeps the row open for the next one.
To add a role to an existing team, click Add role in that team's cell. Or click a team in the list on the left, and then Add Roles, which stays greyed out until a team is picked. Name it, for example Manager.

Roles are optional. A team with no roles works as a single group, and everyone in it reaches everything restricted to the team. You only need roles when some documents are for part of the team.

A team name must be unique in your workspace, and a role name must be unique inside its team. A role belongs to one team.

The table

The main table has one row per role, grouped under its team.

Column	What it is for
Teams	The team's name, the number of roles it has, and a padlock with a count if folders are restricted to it. The Add role and Delete team buttons are here.
Roles	The role's name.
Includes access of	Tick boxes for the other roles in the same team. See below.
Holders	How many people hold the role. Click the number to list their names and emails.
Actions	Delete for the role. Without edit access this column says `Read-only`.

Use Search roles to filter, and the team list on the left to look at one team.

Making roles into levels

By default roles are separate labels. A document kept to Manager is read only by Managers.

If you want seniority, use Includes access of. Tick Intern against Manager and Managers can also read documents kept to Interns. Chain your roles together, for example Intern, then Manager, then HOD, and you get a ladder where each level reads everything below it. Leave the boxes empty and you have plain labels. A mix works too, such as a ladder next to a standalone Auditor role.

A role can only include roles in the same team. Boxes that would create a loop (Manager already includes Intern, so Intern cannot include Manager) are dimmed.

Putting people in teams

Open Manage teams. The list on the left shows Everyone, each team and In no team, each with a count.

With Everyone selected, each person has a row with columns Name, Email, Account, Teams and Roles. Choose + Add team from the drop down on their row. If the team has roles, tick the ones they hold. A team with no roles adds them straight away.
With one team selected, use the Add someone to (team) box at the bottom. Pick the person, tick their roles and click Add.
To give someone a team but no role, choose Add without a role on the pending line. They then reach everything restricted to the team, and nothing kept to a particular role.
A person can belong to several teams, and can hold more than one role in a team. Ticking or unticking a role saves straight away.
To take someone out of a team, click Remove beside that team and confirm.

The owner does not appear in teams. They reach every document already, so the page shows a note instead. The same changes can be made from a person's row on Members, where + Team opens the same choices.

Deleting teams and roles

Delete team also deletes its roles, and cannot be undone. If folders were restricted to the team, they become readable by everyone in the company, and the confirmation box tells you how many.
Delete on a role is refused while anyone holds it. Move those people to another role first.