Manage Your Team

Conspecta uses a two-level permission model: Teams for organization-level membership and Projects for fine-grained access to specific work. Understanding the two layers lets you share broadly with the right collaborators while keeping in-progress data private when you need to.

Teams and Projects

Teams

A team is your research group or institution. Team membership decides who can see and join projects inside the team.

Team roles, in order of authority:

Owners and Admins are the team's leadership, and they reach every project in the team. For a Member it's the reverse: being on the team makes them eligible for a project, but doesn't put them in one.

There's no team-level read-only role. Read-only access is granted per project. See Project roles below.

Projects

Projects live inside teams and hold the actual workspace data: samples, notes, figures, analysis, sequences, and inventory. A project is a focused line of work, such as an aim from a grant, a research program, a study, or anything else you'd otherwise track in its own folder. Project membership decides who can do what with the data.

A project starts with one person and grows by invitation:

• The person who creates a project is its Project lead and has full control of it, including deleting it. Only the Owner and Admins can create one.
• A Member gets in only when the lead adds them to that project, with a role that decides what they can do there. They see nothing of the projects they aren't on.
• Team membership always comes first. You can only add someone who is already an active member of the team. If you type the email of someone who isn't, Conspecta turns it into a team invitation that carries the project roles with it, and they land on the project when they accept. Only the team's Owner and Admins can send that invitation, so a lead who is a plain team member will need one of them to do it.
• The Owner and Admins reach every project in the team without being added, and hold the Project lead's powers on all of them. "Project lead" is really "the lead, or anyone who runs the team".

Project roles, chosen when someone is added and changeable any time from Project Members:

Editor is a working role, not a limited one. An Editor can delete shared work, including work someone else created, not just their own. Everything deleted goes to Trash for 30 days, so it's recoverable rather than gone, but treat the role as "trusted with the data" rather than "can only add to it". They can also rename the project and set its status, including archiving it.

The one thing an Editor can't delete is anything a teammate has marked private. A private item is visible only to its creator, so it stays theirs alone to change, share, or delete.

What only the Project lead can do:

• Add someone to the project, change their role, or remove them
• Move the project to another team, or delete the project
• Permanently remove something a different person deleted, and empty the project's Trash
• Export the whole project at once

View only is built for the people who need to read the work without any risk of altering it: a collaborating PI reviewing results before sign-off, an auditor collecting evidence, a stakeholder following along. A view-only member:

• sees the same app everyone else does, with a View only badge beside the project name, and anything they can't do simply isn't offered
• can read, search, and export everything shared with them, and star items for themselves
• can comment on and sign off a specific item when someone requests their review of it. The request is what grants that, and only for that item
• never sees teammates' private items, like any other member
• uses a seat, the same as any other member of the team

To change someone between Editor and View only, open Project Members on the project page and pick the role from their member menu. The change applies to that project only.

That last point is the deliberate one: a lab's leadership can always get into the lab's work. It's what lets an Admin add a new postdoc to the right projects, or hand a departing student's project to someone else, without chasing down whoever happens to lead it. The flip side is that a project is never private from your Owner and Admins, only from other Members.

The lead can change hands. On the project page, open the menu under any member in Project Members and choose Project lead. The new lead must already be on the team, and the outgoing lead stays on the project as an editor, so they keep working on the data but can no longer manage who has access, move the project, or delete it.

A lead can't simply leave a project they lead. Hand it over first, or archive or delete the project. Editors and viewers can leave whenever they like.

An Owner or Admin doesn't have to pick a successor. Open the menu under whoever leads the project and choose Take project lead to take it yourself, which is usually the answer when the lead has left the group and nobody else is ready to run their work. Either way you'll be asked for your password first. The project's storage stays with the team that owns it, so handing over the lead never moves storage between people and is never refused because of it.

If someone who leads projects is removed from the team altogether, their projects pass to the team's Owner rather than being left without one.

Moving a Project to Another Team

A project can change teams. Open the project, choose Edit, then Move to another team. Reach for this when a study transfers to a collaborating group, when a spin-out takes its work with it, or when a project was simply started in the wrong place.

The project itself doesn't move so much as change hands. It keeps its name, its ID, and every sample, note, figure, and file inside it. Links between items survive, and so does its history. What changes is who the project belongs to, and therefore who can reach it.

The lab stays behind. Freezers, instruments, and suppliers belong to the team rather than to any one project, so they don't travel with it:

• Samples and stock keep their records but lose their storage spots. Place them again in the new team's Facility.
• Supplier links drop off materials and orders. Orders keep the item name they were placed with.
• Dye signatures measured on the old team's cytometers stay on those machines. They're kept rather than deleted, so moving the project back puts them within reach again, but until then the new team can't read them.

You can only move a project into a team you own or administer. That's the safeguard: nobody can push their work into your team without your say-so.

The project's files move with it. Its storage is charged to the new team rather than the old one, so the move is refused if those files would put the destination team over its storage quota. Free up space on that team or upgrade its plan, then move the project.

Access follows the project immediately. The old team's Owner and Admins lose it the moment the move completes. The new team's gain it.

People come along only if they're already on the destination team. This is the part to plan for:

• The Project lead must already be a member of the destination team. If they aren't, Conspecta blocks the move and tells you so. Add them to the destination team first, or hand the project to someone who's already on it, then move it.
• Any member of the project who isn't on the destination team is removed from the project by the move. They keep their account and their other work, and just lose this project.

The move dialog names everyone who will lose access before you commit, so there are no surprises. If someone on the list should keep working on the project, add them to the destination team first and then move it, and they'll come along untouched.

Keeping Work Private or Shared

Team membership and a project's privacy decide who can open it. Inside a project, each item you create also carries its own visibility, so you can keep early work to yourself even among people who share the project. Every item is either:

• Shared so everyone on the project sees it, within their role. This is the default, and it's what keeps the project a complete record the whole group can rely on.
• Private so only you, the owner, can see it. Reach for private while something is rough, exploratory, or not yet ready for others to build on.

Visibility is set per item, not for the whole project. You can keep one sample private while the rest are shared, and switch anything you created between private and shared whenever you like. Changing an item's visibility is something only its creator can do, so nobody can hide your work from the project, and nobody can share a draft you're not ready to show. Most workspace items support this, including samples, lab notes, sequences, image and flow cytometry analysis, data tables, and figures.

A private item is hidden from everyone but you everywhere it would otherwise appear: lists, search, an item's connections, and even the trash. A teammate working in the same project simply doesn't see it until you share it.

Moving Work Between Projects

When work belongs with a different study, you can move it from one project to another. Samples, image analysis, flow cytometry, and figures can each be moved from their own workspace, usually through bulk selection or the item's menu.

A move carries the item's related data along with it. To a scientist, an image analysis is the analysis together with its pictures, so the move keeps them as one unit. The destination project gets its own copy of:

A few things to keep in mind:

• It's a copy, not a hand-off. The original project keeps its version and the destination gets an independent copy. Editing one later doesn't change the other.
• The copy counts toward the destination team's storage. Files are charged to the team that owns the project they sit in, so moving work into another team's project moves the storage bill with it. If that would put the destination team over its quota, nothing moves and you'll get a message saying so; free up space in that team or upgrade its plan, then try again. This applies even between two projects of the same team: the destination gets its own copy of the files, so the team's storage grows by that copy's size. See Cache and storage for how storage is tracked.
• The original owner stays the owner. Moving work to another project doesn't make you its owner. Whoever created each item keeps ownership, so credit and history travel with the work.
• You can't move a teammate's private item. Because a private item is visible only to its owner, it won't move with a bulk selection, and a folder that still contains someone else's private item is declined with a message. Ask them to share it first, or move just the items you own. See Keeping work private or shared.
• Very large moves may be declined with a message explaining the limit. If that happens, move fewer items at once. This is a current size limit, not something you did wrong.

Inviting Members

Inviting to a Team

Only the team Owner and Admins can invite.

1. Open the team's profile (click your team name in the project picker)
2. Click Invite Members
3. Enter the invitee's email
4. Optionally give them a job title (Postdoc, Lab Manager, PhD Student). Pick one of the suggestions or type your own, and it appears next to their name in the member list
5. Pick the projects they should be added to up front, so they land with somewhere to work
6. Pick their project access, either Editor or View only, which applies to every project you selected
7. They receive an invitation in their Inbox (and by email if their settings allow it)

New invitees join as Members. To make someone an Admin, the team Owner changes their role from the member list after they've accepted.

Job titles belong to the team, so the same person can be a Postdoc in one team and a Lab Manager in another. The Owner and Admins set them, at invite time or later from the member's menu in the member list. Members don't edit their own, though the Owner can set their own title. You can also change the title on a pending invitation, which sends a fresh invitation and retires the earlier link.

Invitations are time-limited. If one expires before it's accepted, send a fresh one.

Adding to a Project

An existing team member can be added to a project at any time, by the project's lead or by the team's Owner or Admins:

1. Open the project
2. Go to Project Members
3. Add the member, choosing Editor or View only

You don't need to send another invite. The existing team member just gets project access.

User Profiles

Every user has a profile with:

• A profile picture and cover image to personalize their identity
• A name and organization
• A bio and publications/URLs they want to share with collaborators
• The teams they belong to

Team Profiles

Each team has a public profile with:

• A description of the group's research
• The member list with current roles and job titles
• The projects in the team
• Optional publications/URLs linking to the group's website or papers

Removing Members

Team owners and admins can remove members from the team. Removing a member revokes access to every project in that team.

Transferring Team Ownership

Every team has exactly one Owner. The Owner is the only person who can change the plan, transfer the team, or delete it. When the right person needs to take over, the current Owner transfers ownership to another active team member.

To transfer ownership:

1. Open the team's profile
2. Find the member you want to make Owner under Members
3. Choose Transfer ownership from their member menu
4. Confirm your identity by re-entering your password (and your authenticator code if you have two-factor turned on). Because handing over a team is hard to undo, Conspecta asks you to verify it's really you
5. The previous Owner is automatically demoted to Admin so they keep day-to-day access without the billing responsibility

The transfer is atomic. There's never a moment where the team has no Owner or two Owners.

Both people get an email once the transfer goes through: a confirmation to the new Owner and a heads-up to the previous Owner. If you ever get that heads-up for a transfer you didn't make, contact the new owner or reach out to support right away.

If the previous Owner needs to leave the team entirely, they can do that from their member menu after the transfer, and their access drops to whatever role you've assigned them, or none if they remove themselves.

Deleting a Team

Only the Owner can delete a team, from Edit team on the team's profile. Before you confirm, the dialog box counts what goes with it and asks you to type the team name.

Deleting a team destroys the lab's shared records for good:

• Every location in Facility, including freezers, rooms, and instruments
• Everything attached to those locations: bookings, booking rules, downtime, announcements, and the whole service log, so the instrument schedule and maintenance history go with them
• Every dye signature measured on the lab's cytometers, in every project that used them, and nothing else can recreate those numbers
• Every vendor in Suppliers
• Every template the team shares, both notebook and data table, along with the images pasted into them and the team's logo and cover
• Anything of theirs already in the trash, before its 30 days are up
• Every membership and pending invitation

Projects are the exception. They aren't deleted with the team, so the team can't be deleted while it still has any. Delete each project or move it to another team first, then come back.