Guests (Notion)
A simple way to share (parts of) a Notion workspace with folks from outside your organisation (and therefore workspace), is through guests.[1]. This is available on free accounts up to (I think) 10 guests. Currently (2023.02 - 2023.06), this is the way to go for me.
How it works
Probably the most obvious approach:
- Go to the item you want to share (including the top-level page of a workspace to share the whole workspace)
- Click on Share at the top-right corner of the page
- Enter an email address
- Somehow make sure that you want to share with this person as guest and not as member - The latter is a payed feature
The current page and its descendants will now be shared. E.g.: When a home page has subpages and you share the home page, the subpages will also be shared. However, if the home page has the same hierarchical level as the other pages, the other pages won't be shared.
How many guests?
Maybe the confusion happened like this:
- It's about the workspace in the image above, with already 9 guests
- I added someone, who happened to already have a Notion account
- Notion suggested to add her as Member
- Only by clicking on Skip for now can I avoid that, and invite her as Guest.
Summary: This works as intended and actually even a bit better: You can easily see if an object has been shared.
Context
- In one project, I created two tasks. One that is shared and one that isn't
- The other person (a dummy account called Jeronimus) should only see his one shared task, and preferably the project record
- I went to that one task-to-be-shared » Shared (top-right) » Share through email address. Default was full rights - I didn't change that
- In the Notion account for Jeronimus, under Workspaces, the workspace to which this task belongs, appeared
- Jeronimus only sees this one object and can edit it. Edits appear in the owner's account.
- Good news: You can see that an object is shared because of icons on the top-right that indicate the accounts that have access to it.
- Same procedure as above. However, I can't find it back in Jeronimus' Notion
- Unfortunately, what I can find back: The whole workspace, available to anyone on the Internet (I can see it in a Chrome Guest session). Now I understand why Notion 'opened the session externally' (or something like that). Seemed that the option Share to web was (accidentially?) enabled. I disabled it, and now I can't reach it anymore in a Guest session
Appearantly, I did something wrong above. I tried again, and it seemed to just work: