Sorry if this is the wrong channel for enterprise self hosted questions. My company is using Seatable DE for our production schedule and it’s been a great success! We are planning to move to the SeaTable EE version soon in order to use the advanced permissions feature. As part of this upgrade we want to be able to share a read only version of our schedule base to other department managers and sales people. None of these people have a need to use Seatable other than viewing the schedule, so paying for an account for each is wasteful. We just want a way for them to view the base and to control what views they can see (they shouldn’t be able to see everything, just what we control). If they can comment on the rows that’s a bonus.
I see in other posts that on the SeaTable Cloud version people register free accounts for this purpose and share the base with advanced permissions to the free accounts. Can I accomplish something similar on the self hosted version? I’ve tried the external link share, but that gives them access to everything.
Thanks for putting together such a useful piece of software. We’re really loving it!!
Hi Tim,
first of all, we are very pleased to hear that the introduction of SeaTable in your company has “been a great success”. Wonderful.
Second, there is a misunderstanding on the features available in SeaTable Cloud and especially our paid plans. It is correct that the paid plans include advanced permissions of which custom sharing permissions is a part. It is incorrect that you can use a custom sharing permission to share with users beyond your team. Custom sharing permissions can only be used with users in your team. But actually, I think this is of no relevance for you.
In SeaTable Server Enterprise Edition - I am talking the on-premises product - you can create external links for views (as opposed to an external link for a base). An external link for a view grants read-only access to one view. Use such a link to share your schedule with your department managers and sales staff. (They cannot make comments. It is strictly read-only. For any edit permission, the user must login, hence requires a license.)
If you want to share multiple views, you’ll have to create multiple external links for views. To facilitate the handling of multiple links, you can embed them in a website. At the bottom of this page, you see how this would look. The embedded base is our press base, but actually it is not the entire base but merely one view of the table “overview”.
Thanks for the detailed reply @rdb!! I’m glad you’ve cleared up the advanced permissions functionality, I was a bit confused about that one after reading through the forums.
What you describe for the view sharing sounds like a good solution. I’d seen it mentioned elsewhere in the forums but I couldn’t for the life of me find this feature! Now that you’ve prompted me I notice the sharing icon to the right of the view controls. I’ve been looking right past it the whole time! I think this will meet our needs now.
For anyone else interested in this type of function, I had also accomplished this by making our schedule a common dataset and creating a new base with it inside, then creating an external link to the entire base but locking table, header and column permissions as well as the defined views. What’s neat about this is I could recreate the views we need all under one link and I can share multiple tables under one link. I just have to handle refreshing of data via the API, since the auto sync feature seems to only happen once per day?
I noticed that leaving a view unlocked allows the user to alter the view, but when the page is refreshed the filter resets back to how I have it set. This is really useful for custom searches/filtering. I created an unlocked view with nothing set, the user can filter/sort/group as they need and when refreshed it resets to nothing set. Not sure if this is by design, but its really useful. Well done!
Give yourself a big pat on the back SeaTable team. This is a great package that you offer at a good price. Also the ability to self host is a game changer, we’ve been waiting a long time for something like this! Cheers
I think this will meet our needs now.
