Tag: Organisations

A big new feature was released today! The organisations & teams feature. It is replacing the “collaborations” feature. The “collaborations” feature didn’t worked out very well. It was too difficult and too time consuming to ad collaborators to the project. You had to fill the collaborators list for each project separately. That was just a lot of repeating work and many users asked for a “Team” feature, where you can define a Team once and assign a Team to a project. The new release today goes even one step further.

Organisations

Now VersionEye has a concept of organisations, just like GitHub. Now projects can belong to an organisation, instead of to a single user. An organisation can have multiple teams, license whitelists, component whitelists and projects. A user can create/belong to multiple organisations.

The license and component whitelists are now only available through organisations. That way it’s easier to share them with other team members.

Teams

Every organisation has by default at least 1 team. The “Owners” team. The users in the “Owners” Team are the administrators of the organisation. They can:

• edit the organisation detail informations
• create/delete teams
• add users to a team
• remove users from a team
• create/edit/delete license whitelists
• create/edit/delete component whitelists
• create/edit/delete projects inside of the organisation
• transfer project ownership to the organisation

They can not:

• delete the “Owners” team
• delete the last user/member in the “Owners” team. There must be always at least 1 member in that team.

Members of other teams can:

• remove them self from the list
• edit/delete projects which are assigned to the team.
• see all projects inside of the organisation

They can not:

• edit the organisations detail informations
• create/delete teams
• add new members to a team
• remove other members from a team
• create/edit/delete license whitelists
• create/edit/delete component whitelists
• transfer project ownership to the organisation

Transfer a project to an organisation

If you want to work on a project with multiple team members it makes sense to transfer the project to an organisation and assign a team to the project. First of all you have to create an organisation. If you do so, you are automatically added to the “Owners” team of that organisation. Now you can transfer a project to the newly created organisation. Just go the project detail page to the settings tab. At the bottom you will see a select input field with all organisations where you have admin rights.

Simply select the organisation which should be the new owner of the project and click the “Transfer” button. If you go back to the project list view where you can see all your projects, you will notice that the project disappeared. Above the project list there is a filter. The first input field is the organisation filter. By default your personal account is pre selected. But here you can select and filter for an organisation you belong to. That way you will see only projects from that organisation.

Create a Team

A team is a collection of users inside an organisation which work on the same projects. Navigate to the “Team” page inside your organisation and create as many teams as you want.

Click on the team name to add some team members. Simply start typing the username or full name of a user and you will get some autocompletion with existing users.

Every new member of the team will receive an email notification that he was added to your team/organisation.

Now navigate to a project which you transferred already to the organisation. In the settings tab at the bottom a list of all teams of the organisation will show up. Simply select the team you would like to assign to the project and click the “transfer” button.

All the team members will receive the email notifications to the project. They all can edit the project settings and use their own API key to update the project via the API.

API

The API was updated as well. If a project is created through the API it can be assigned to an organisation at creation time.

The “orga_name” is optional. If it matches with an existing organisation name and the users API key has admin permissions for that organisation, the project will be assigned to that orga. Otherwise the project belongs to the user which is creating the project.

The other changes of the API are transparent for the users.

What is missing

Delivering this “Organisations/Teams” feature was a big refactoring. A lot of code had to be touched for that and the work is still not 100% done. 3 important things are still missing:

1. Payment/Billing: Currently the organisation itself can’t have a subscription/plan. This is coming soon. The final goal is that an organisation can subscribe to plan and the whole billing is happening through an organisation, just like at GitHub.
2. Creating Projects: If you create a new project via the API you can assign it directly to an organisation. This doesn’t work in the web interface yet. If you create a new project through the UI it always belongs to your user account and you have to transfer the project to an organisation if you want to have it in an organisation.
3. OAuth: If a project was created through an OAuth process, for example from GitHub, Bitbucket or Stash, VersionEye needs OAuth credentials to update the project regularly. As the organisation doesn’t have OAuth credentials itself VersionEye randomly picks a team member of the project and assumes that the team member has the right OAuth credentials to update the project. In future it will be possible to pick a team member which should be used for OAuth update operations.

Feedback

This is a big new feature and many users and companies asked for it. Please test it and give constructive feedback. I would like to know how well it works for you and what else (beside the 3 points above) is missing to make it super awesome. You can leave a comment here, mention VersionEye at Twitter and simply shoot me an email.