Create/Update Document User Collaborator limitation

Hi ​@Michel L 

To successfully manage document collaborators via the API, ensure one of the following conditions is met:

• The documents are owned by your admin/service account, or
• The documents are stored in a folder where your admin/service account has sharing rights that propagate to the documents.
• Beside that, Have existing document owners grant your admin/service account “Can edit and share” permission on their documents (or on the containing folders).

Without ownership or explicit share permissions, the PUT endpoint will not allow you to add or update collaborators, even if you are an account admin.

To learn more on how Lucidchart’s sharing model works- Limit write access to a Lucidchart diagram | Community

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

To well understand that means that when you are the account owner, if someone creates a document, you cannot modify the access of the document except if the user explicitely gives you the edit and share permissions.
That means that some document could be “hidden” by a user?

Hi ​@Michel L,

Thank you for your response, and thank you ​@Humas1985 for providing such great context here!

I wanted to jump in and add a few suggestions here! Account admins can make account-wide changes such as to account settings, user management, licenses, and integrations. However, it does not grant you automatic Edit and Share permissions for every private document created by your users. This is why your API requests are failing for documents you don't own.

If you are on an Enterprise account, please try these following steps:

1. Ensure your account (or the service account running the API) has the Document Admin role. This role is specifically designed to let you see and manage any document owned by the organization.

2. Once you have that role, you can use the Document Discovery in the Admin Panel to search for those hidden documents and change their ownership or move them to a Team Folder.

3. For future automation, the best practice is to have users work out of Team Folders. Since Team Folders are owned by the account itself, your Admin API calls will have the necessary inheritance to manage collaborators without needing explicit permission from the creator every time.

Please let me know if you have additional questions or concerns!

Hi Alison,

Thank you for this clarification but I believe that I must understand “the best practice is to have users to not work out of Team Folders.” instead of “the best practice is to have users work out of Team Folders”.

Am I right.

Regards.

Hi ​@Michel L,

Thank you for your response! I’m happy to provide some clarity here:

Actually, the best practice is to have users work inside Team Folders (or Team Hubs) rather than avoiding them. This is because they make collaboration easier than ever by allowing Enterprise teams to store documents in one place that can be made accessible to all account members, which solves the API permission issue you are seeing.

Please take a look at this Lucid Help Center article to create team folders.

One important note: Enterprise accounts created after May 15, 2024, do not have access to Team Folders. If your account was created after that date, we recommend leveraging Team Hubs to organize teams and share documents. Team Hubs provide a dedicated team space, a team roster, and a collection of all your relevant team documents in one spot.

Please let me know if you have any additional questions!