Improve management of the shared with me section
There is a very large issue with sharing that really needs to be addressed for the sake of the experience working with this platform.
Currently, when someone shares something with you, you cant unshare it for yourself unless you are a member of the space it was created in. For example User A from space A shares a folder that resides in Space A to User B. User B is not a member of space A, but they are given access to a project in space A anyway.
Now lets imagine that project is completed, or its orphaned, or maybe even the space is orphaned. User B has no way to remove this item themselves and "unsubscribe" themselves from it. This leads to the item being perpetually listed in their "shared with me" section. The only way to clean it up would be for User A to unshare the item with User B or have an account administrator dig through the labyrinth of old shared items and figure out how to remove the share.
This inevitably makes the "shared with me" section totally unusable for any given user since it is full of irrelevant folders and projects that they have zero control of.
1. Placing the onus of cleaning up old projects on user A is unrealistic. There is no real world scenario where users think about unsharring old projects before archiving them because they are considering how cluttered they are making someone else's "shared with me" They don't have visibility to it and frankly it is out of sight out of mind for them.
2. User B is confused because they have a SWM list that is full of content they don't need anymore, and they are painfully aware of how little control they have over what shows up here.
3. useful things that show up in the SWM section are eclipsed by the irrelevant objects that flood this area. This undermines creating a structured org where everyone can access a folder that resides in a space they are not a member of, but still need some kind of access to.
4. I understand the limitations around allowing users to unshare something that was dictated to them. That is simply not how the security works in Wrike
To be clear, I am not talking about subscriptions to communications o an object. That is irrelevant to this issue.
I propose that Wrike allows users to hide objects in the SWM section so at the very least they can make the list practical again themselves. There would be an option on each object to hide it. There would also be a filter on the SWM section that allows you to toggle hidden objects in this area. This would get around the security limitations, and also make the SWM section meaningful for the individual. Even if you allowed the user to create a folder under SWM and drag unneeded items into it that would be acceptable.
Bottom line is that expecting users to clean up sharing on any sort of consistent basis is unrealistic. There is no standard operating procedure that would be able to micromanage this effectively over time. It is hard enough to get users to fully grasp how setting up a share works. Expecting them to go back to old items and micromanage the sharing settings is both impractical and a waste of their time.
We are a team of 22 using Wrike. We work with more than 50 clients who have to approve tasks and files and are invited as collaborator users. I think because we're so new yet, there's not so much projects yet for us to suffer with the same issue as Patrick is suffering. But I can clearly see that we are heading the same path. So everything that helps to manage this section it's gonna be really great.
And there's a really odd thing that happened involving the sharing/following that we didn't really figure out yet.
We work with social media marketing and our team has to complete several steps before the client is set to the task for the approval step. But one analyst shared all the tasks for the entire month with a client for him to approve the month's overview/themes.
Then the client started receiving notifications for every single update each task had during the steps that matter only to our creative team. The client complained about receiving more than 20 notification emails a day and so we removed the client from the "follow" and "sharing" sections for the folder, projects and tasks.
The strange thing is that even with the client not showing in the following section of the tasks, he keep getting the email notifications. Every email had the info "you are receiving this because you follow the task", but that was not true anymore. The only thing that worked were deleting the tasks and creating new ones.
Reading Patrick's case, I wish I've looked in the "Shared With Me" section of our client to see if the tasks were there as well.
The impression we had is that there might be some glitch with the following function when it is used in conjunction with the approval process inside a task.
Hi Pcat810, sorry for the delay here.
Thank you for leaving such a detailed post and for highlighting this for us. We've shared this with the Product team and as soon as I have an update to share in relation to this I'll be back in touch here.
Neyl Walecki - It sounds as though you may be experiencing an issue here, so I've raised a ticket with our Support team for you. They'll be in touch to assist further. If you need anything else let me know 👍
Elaine Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Conosci le straordinarie funzionalità di Wrike e le best practices
Elaine Wrike Team member Conosci le straordinarie funzionalità di Wrike e le best practices
A thousands times yes to the OP. The shared with me section is a mess for most of our 300 users. Any advice or workarounds while we wait for a feature update?
Hi Andrew Boekestein! Do you use the starred section in Wrike? You can star a task or folders&projects for quick reference and use that section to find the items you need easily. Can this work for you?
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa, is this in the New Experience as well?
Andrew Boekestein It works in the classic and the new navigation. If you're using the classic navigation, you'll have your starred section in your folder tree, and you can start tasks, projects and folders and they then can be easily found in that section:
Hope this helps 🙂
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover