License for collaborating with external users

Hi ​@Dominic B 

Please refer to the following breakdown of collaborator rules within Lucid

• View access - External users do not need a Lucid license and may not even require a Lucid account if the document is shared via a public link.

• Comment access - External users don’t need a paid license but do need a free Lucid account, which is usually sufficient for commenting.

• Edit access - Typically, external users can edit with a free Lucid account, though there are feature and usage limits. In some organizational setups, they may need a paid license to edit.

• Edit and Share access - The same licensing rules as Edit apply, but the user also has the ability to reshare the document.

Bottomline for your problem statement would be this ,

External users with Edit access don’t need a paid license from your organization but must have a free Lucid account to edit. Licensing requirements may vary slightly based on your plan and the permission level shared (View, Comment, Edit, or Edit and Share).

To learn more:

Collaborators outside of your Organization | Community

Share with collaborators in Lucid – Lucid

Hope this helps - Happy to help further!!
Thank you very much and have a great one!
Warm regards

Hi, thanks very much - super helpful.

​@Humas1985 , to your point about our problems statement, perhaps i can take a bit more of everyone;s time and clarify a bit:

We have external customers signing in to a web portal that we have developed ourselves, and we’d like to present users with quick links to Lucid Chart documents so they can View them.

The user flow would be to sign in to our portal and, based on their role, they would see links to their specific Lucid diagrams. The diagrams would be confidential, for our project team’s and our customer / user’s eyes only.

So I assume we wouldn’t want to use Public links (assuming they make the document available to the Internet?) - instead we would just use “View access” shared links which means the user would then be prompted to create a Lucid account to view them?

Or maybe we can embed the diagram securely??

Hi ​@Dominic B, 

Thanks for following up! In this case, I would recommend one of the following options: 

• If you are on an Enterprise account, you can set a passcode for a share link. This ensures that only users with the passcode can access your document. 
• You can use Join ID, which allows you to generate a short code that you can quickly send to collaborators to give them access to your document. The main difference between setting a passcode and using Join ID is that the Join ID code expires after 2 hours. 

Please let me know if you run into any additional questions! 

OK, super helpful. Thanks very much ​@Michelle S. Case closed 😊

If I might piggy back on this post.

​@Michelle S, your answer makes sense but as I look at our admin settings, are there things here that need to be modified so that shareables & editable links can be sent to people outside of our organization?

Thank you!

Hi ​@CSIEVERTS, thank you for continuing this post! I’m happy to help answer your questions. 

• The ‘Public’ setting is only for shareable links. I would recommend enabling it if you’d like to allow your team to share with external collaborators via a shareable link. If not, they should still be able to share directly via email invitation (if allowed in the admin settings). 
• For the allowed domains, could you try entering each domain on a new line instead of separating them with a comma?

Hope this helps! Please feel free to let me know if you have any additional questions!

Thank you ​@Leianne C, putting the domains on separate lines work which wasn’t intuitive as I was obviously expecting to use commas or semi-colons.

With the domains listed, am I correct in assuming that I don’t need to also have the “Public” setting enabled for shareable links via email to the listed domains?

Hi ​@CSIEVERTS, thank you for confirming! I understand the confusion with using separate lines and have shared that feedback with our development teams. To help me share the best recommendation, would you mind sharing more information about how you’d like your team to share documents with external users? For example, do you want your team to share via direct email invitations only OR would you like your team to be able to create shareable links (URLs) to share with others too? 

Selecting the Restrict to following domains when sharing an item via email setting means your users will only be able to share documents with other users on allowed domains when sharing via email. If a user attempts to share outside of those listed they will get a notification saying that they are not allowed to do so.

For shareable links:

• Public setting: Users can see the ‘Any logged in user’ option when generating the shareable link - this allows any logged in user with the link to access the document. 
• Restricted setting: Users can generate a share link that will only be accessible for other users on the account. For example the ‘leitest’ option in my example screenshot below. 
• Off: Users will not be able to generate any shareable links to share their document. 

If you’d like your users to still be able to share with external collaborators using a URL, you will need to have to enable the Public setting for shareable links. 

I hope this helps. Please feel free to let me know if you have any additional questions!

Thank you ​@Leianne C for this write-up.

Our use case is that we are merging with another company who also has Lucid licenses and there is a need to collaborate only between our orgs so the ability to limit where shareable links are sent is critical. 

Your simple screenshot help with the distinction between when & why you would create a link that was previously unclear to me. It has also been very helpful to know that for anyone we create these links for, they do not need one of our licenses to be considered a “licensed user”.

We have been able to start sharing & collaborating on these documents between our orgs.

Thank you for the response, ​@CSIEVERTS. I’m glad to hear that information was helpful! Shareable links are helpful especially if you’re sharing with a larger group of users however, it sounds like collaboration needs to be limited to the two orgs. In that case, I would recommend restricting shareable links to users on your account and email invitations to specific domains.

This way, your users can still use the share link internally and invite collaborators from the other org to their documents via email invitations. 

I’ve also heard back from our development team and it looks like the issue you experienced with separating domains by new line is not expected behaviour. I’ve reported this for further investigation and will update this thread with any new information about a fix.

Feel free to let me know if you have any additional questions about these settings!