Collaborator Usage

Any examples would be great! 😀

Most of our Vendors are assigned to tasks  in Wrike and they use Collaborator license since they only update task status and add comments to their tasks. Other departments that don't use Wrike often are assigned with collaborator licenses too, if they only need to see/check the overall status of projects or their progress. Collaborators can access reports and spaces if they are shared with them. I also added a custom field in our report showing the latest phase of the project (Initiation, Tooling, First Article, PPAP, Production) so it will be easier for them to check without more clicking, although this needs to be updated manually and I don't mind doing it. :)

I don't know if this will be helpful or not. We don't have just "collaborators" anymore (long story), but when we did we had a few stakeholders set as collaborators so we could limit them just to reviews. I also set up with custom dashboards so they had one spot to go every day to see what was going on without getting lost. Because they were just collaborators, they weren't very savvy at Wrike, so I tried making it as easy as possible for them. 

We use collabortaors not only for stakeholders like product managers but also for e.g. purchasing department. It works well as we manage R&D projects and so the purchasing gest tasks they see but it is enough if they work on the tasks and they have not to manage much in projects. If they have something it has mostly impact to the project plan and so they comment in their task with mention of the project manager who has to solve the problem. The same with PLMs. Nevertheless we do not handle this strict. We also have some more involved buyers or PLMs which have a full Wrike license and working in the projects in depth.

We use Collaborators in a similar way that Sven and Brittany do.  For users that need to be in Wrike to submit requests, or for those that are involved with tasks, but they don't require additional access to reports or dashboards, etc.  This means the work can stay in Wrike, and not in emails or other channels that might get lost.

We also perform semi annual reviews of our Users' usage activity.  If they haven't accessed Wrike or don't seem to be using it, then we downgrade them to a Collaborator to free up our available seat licenses - this way they can still access, they aren't deleted or deactivated - and if something changes they can easily revert to a regular user again.

We invite our customers to be collaborators - they have a special space for meeting agendas, place to ask questions, a place to upload progress photos of their machine builds, approval drawings, we also have a truncated project timeline in this area.

The best use is this keeps track of when we are waiting on a customer response before we can move forward. 

After the project is finished, we give the collaborators 1 month to download anything they need from the project space, then it is archived and their license cancelled.

We are a creative team and sometimes collaborate with other agencies. In those situations where someone external is responsible for some of the work on a particular job or set of jobs, then we will add them as a collaborator. Most of our clients do not need to see the full task but are responsible for reviewing the work we have done. In that instance, send them files to review via the proofing tool. 

We manage deployments and most of our resources are assigned the Collaborator role. We do this as most of these resources just need to comment or update status. This allows us controls to prevent date changes (note: our Wrike account was created before the ability to create different roles with limited capabilities). As an example, right now we are at the beginning of our cutover tasks to go-live. We have 1000s of tasks that need to be execute by 50+ people at different times. 90+% of the assignees are collaborators as all they need to do is either make a comment in the task or change the task status.

We invite our customers as collaborators and share the main folder of their project where among other things they can find the monthly social media project/calendar, meetings notes and other planning information. We use the approval and proofing functionality for them to review all the creative work and contents like blogposts and ebooks.

We also use collaborators for clients that we are developing websites for. They specially use the Gantt chart to follow up the progress of the project.

:-)