I’ve been trying to understand how best to incorporate freelancers into our BC workflow and wondered if I could throw it out to the wider community? Maybe I don’t understand how to use permissions properly, but i’d love to find a way to empower them into the BC system.

We use offshorers to do our design work, and especially since we started using ProofHQ as a BC add-in we’re really interested in allowing them access to our system. Our first issue was wanting to moderate their comments on the message section of BC, and we think we’ve worked out a way to do that with ProofHQ at least- but it still means they have access to the rest of BC, and as far as I know they can see messages marked as ‘Private’ which doesn’t work when these messages tend to be my co-workers moaning about the freelancers!

Any ideas of ways I can control access so that our freelancers have “view only” privilages, or access only to some areas of BC? This is also relevant when we want to track internal discussions with them- right now we tend to use Skype (or the Elance message centre), but i’d like to integrate this better within BC, and particularly with Campfire- ideally i’d like to give our freelancers access to each of our projects for chat purposes, and particularly to our internal ‘project’ where we administrate our internal company tasks (but don’t want them nosing around our todos or milestones)

Hope someone has had the same thoughts and has found a way to do it

Tom

Tom,

Not sure if this helps, but….

We have half a dozen independent contractors (they hate the word “freelancer” :^) who we use regularly across many different projects. We created a new “company” called “Contractors” and put them all under that umbrella. They rarely work on the same projects at the same time.

When we have a project that requires one of these contractors, we simply assign the Contractors “company” to the project and only check off those people who are involved with that project to receive updates. We can control their access easily that way.

~stan

We do the same as zukowski.

We are able to set the Contractors to be able to see Private items across the board so they are ‘almost’ within the inner sanctum. Works well for us.

Oscar, how do you get contractors to see private messages, I thought this only let people in ‘your company’ see them?

Any company can be set to view Private Messages.

Under “Edit this company” check the box regarding Private Message access.

Be aware that this means all people in the selected company can view private messages across all projects. [ie it is a global setting]

We’ve set up a company called “Contractors” that is a collection of various people we work with who are more a part of our team than the client’s team. [illustrators, photographers, freelancers etc] They all have access to private messages.