Sharing a plan
Plans are private until you share them. Who can see one, who can edit it, and the one link that sits outside the rules.
Readers can comment, reply and suggest edits on documents they can access. Editors can accept changes where they maintain the source, and can use an available plan agent without owning the plan. A copied discussion link preserves the plan's access rules. See Comments and suggested edits.
A plan is private to whoever created it. Nobody else in your workspace can see it, including owners, until it is shared.
That is the default because a half-written plan is a draft, and a draft that everyone can read is a draft nobody writes honestly.
Three ways a plan is visible
| Who can see it | |
|---|---|
| Private | You, plus anyone you share it with. |
| Team | Everyone in the workspace. |
| Shared with specific people | The teammates you name, as viewer or editor. |
Sharing works on the top-level plan and covers its whole sub-plan tree. You do not share sub-plans one by one.
Open Share on a sub-plan and it sends you up
Because the settings belong to the plan above it, a sub-plan has none of its own to show. Share there tells you the current access, says sharing is managed on the parent plan, and gives you one button to open the plan that controls it. There are no controls to touch, so you cannot change the whole tree from a screen that looks like it is about one branch.
On a top-level plan the dialog names how many active sub-plans the settings cover before you touch anything: "these settings apply to X and its 3 active sub-plans". Archived sub-plans are not counted, because they are not in your plan list either; the sharing settings still reach them, and so does any public prototype link they hold.
plansmith share and the API say the same thing: every sharing response carries a sentence naming
the plan a change lands on.
Your access is the lower of two things
Someone's access to a plan is the lower of their workspace role and their role on that plan.
The consequence that surprises people: giving a Comment-only teammate editor access on a plan does not make them an editor. They can still only read and comment, because their workspace role is the ceiling. Plansmith refuses that grant rather than accepting it and quietly doing nothing.
For what each workspace role can do, see Members and roles.
Prototype links are different, on purpose
A prototype share link is a public URL. Whoever holds it can open the prototype, signed in or not.
Switching a plan back to Private does not revoke an existing prototype link. The link was published deliberately, so it is revoked deliberately: open the share dialog and revoke it there, where you can also see how many live links exist.
Creating, rotating or extending a prototype link requires ownership of the plan. Revoking one only needs edit access, because revoking can only ever narrow who sees it.