Just a general question here hoping to get some conversation about how people are dealing with remote artists and custom permissions if at all?
My studio is relying on hiring remote teams or individuals to complete work, so they want the ability to use SG where possible to assign work to these artists, give them access to certain items published that are relevant to them and prevent them from seeing anything outside the scope of their work. So think notes, briefing and reference published materials. The studio also wants to do this without handcrafting packages of this data to send to these people.
I’ve considered requesting a more customised permissions group from SG support to assign to these artists but I think other then making these group similar to a Vendor in that they only see materials they themselves create or publish to Tasks they are assigned I haven’t got a good generic solution for briefing and reference material that might not be directly associated with the Task they are assigned.
In general the permissions model in SG is not great, and this has been raised before, so I guess I’m looking forward to when we have more a more granular level of control similar to other permissions systems.
I think I can use a locked down permissions group and then for anything that isn’t handled by the ruleset that needs to be sent offer that a Client Review Playlist is shared with this artists Client Review account that contains this material and enable download of source files so they can receive additional content.
The work required by these artists doesn’t need to make use of any SGTK integrations so on that side of things they can work off pipeline, provided they have access to relevant materials.
For submission of their completed work we have this covered and it’s working well. Currently we are relying on the artists to upload an attachment of their work directly through SG and handle this on our end via shotgunEvents.
Anyone have suggestions or can shed some light on how this is achieved elsewhere?
The workflow that comes to mind here is to leverage Groups. All the Vendor permissions allow for associating things with a Group the user belongs to, in order to make it visible to them. So if you have a Group for “Vendor X”, you could set the Artist field for reference Versions to that Group, or copy this Group in the To or CC field for a Note, and they would all be able to see them.
You could even automate this with a trigger if you wanted to cut down even further on the effort involved each time. Though we tend to be cautious around automation for Vendor visibility, as most clients want to carefully curate what their vendors can and cannot see.
I understand completely, our permissions model can be frustrating, confusing and complex at times. That said, it is also quite powerful and flexible, despite being a bit hard to use at times. There is a long list of improvements we would like to make to the permissions system, but we know it will be a very large project whenever we do dive in there, so it is not something that we have chosen to invest in quite yet.
All that said, I would encourage you to send your ideas and feedback about features like this to our product team via our new public roadmap portal.
Would be great to hear any other ideas or experiences anyone else has, for sure.
