Working with guests and clients in Asana

Working with Asana, there is a good chance that at one point you’ll feel the need to work with guests. The official definition of a guest in Asana is someone that does not have an email address matching your domain. So if your email is bob@hero-corp.com, then your organization domain is hero-corp.com, and anyone signing up in Asana with an email in @hero-corp.com will be members of your organization. Anyone with a different email address will be matched up with their own domain, and will be added as a guest.

A guest can be added at different levels in your organization. If you add a guest as a collaborator of the task, he/she will only see the task itself without any project attached to it. The guest will be able to change the due date, title, notes, complete the task and change custom fields. Whether or not they see all the custom fields from all the projects the task belongs to, is not guaranteed and might change in the future, so make sure to run a few tests if you store private data in custom fields.

If a guest is added as a project member, he/she will be able to see the entire project and all of the public tasks. The guest will be able to complete tasks, create others, or even delete tasks. Unless, of course, you set his/her permissions to « Comment only » so he is only able to comment (which is often enough!).

If a guest is added as a team member, he/she will be able to see all of the public projects, and all of the above will apply. Guests are almost like any other member; however, they can’t create new custom fields for example. Make sure to read the Asana Guide for an up-to-date list on guest permissions.

The biggest advantage of inviting guests, is that they don’t count towards your number of paid seats. If you are on a paid plan, you can work with as many guests as you’d like. However, the free plan still has a limit of 15 members or guests per team.

Manager: Make sure your team understands the different levels of permissions for guests, and make sure a client, for example, is not invited as a team member, but rather as a task collaborator or as a member of a project containing only content he/she is allowed to see (unless you have a dedicated client project).

Bonus: If you have never been invited as a guest to another organization, I suggest you run a simple test. Invite yourself with a personal email address to a task, then add yourself to a project, and then invite yourself to the team to see what your guests will experience at different levels within your organization.

Discover the other 4 free chapters from my ebook “Secrets of Successful teams in Asana”:
— Architectural Balance in Asana
— Keep it clean and organized in Asana
— The perfect layout for the perfect Asana project
— How many Asana teams?

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