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.

This whole workspace is shared with my alter ego as Guest - It often seems like trial-and-error to make someone a guest. For extra excitement, its with only read privileges

Account » Settings and Members:

You can see that there is one guest at this workspace
You can also see what exactly is shared with this guest
You can convert the guest to admin
At the Members tab, you can add members
But you cannot add guests anywhere here.

The same workspace - From the side of the guest. Seems really well

How many guests?

Occasionally I get a message that I try to have more than 5 guests. At the same time, I have 9 guests here. BTW: The guests with whom I shared more than 1 page: That's a mistake: I accidentially shared both the main page + a sub page

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.

You can't partially share a relation

→ Share & relations (Notion)

Case: Share some stuff with a collegue - 2022.12.08

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

Share one task

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.

At the very top, you can see that an object is shared - need!

Share project record - Everything got shared?

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

Share project record - Works!

Appearantly, I did something wrong above. I tried again, and it seemed to just work:

Invited user Jeronimus got notified by email that a page was shared with him

This is what Jeronimus sees as part of this workspace. Note that also here, you can see only one workspace at a time, so it might be awkward to copy (or link) stuff from here into your own 'private' workspace - But 'operationally collaborating' would probably be easy

Note how fine-grained control is: Jeronimus can't even see Category or the names of people, associated with this task

There are now three persons associated with this task. Two 'person records' have been shared with Jeronimus and indeed: Jeronimus sees two names - not the third one. Jeronimus can even click-through to the records of Jeroen. There is a link to the shared record, but that's not visible here - Probably stretching stuff too far

Guests (Notion)

Inhoud