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Collaboration & Sharing

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Protos supports sharing resources with teammates and publishing canvases for external stakeholders.

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Communities

A community is the top-level workspace in Protos. Projects, models, canvases, and team members all belong to a community. You can be a member of more than one community at the same time.

Finding your communities

Click Communities in the sidebar — it sits near the bottom, just above your profile. This opens the Communities page, which shows a card for each community you belong to, along with any pending invitations.

Setting an active community

Mark one community Active from its card on the Communities page (the button reads Set as active until you click it). Once set, the Shared with me tab on Schemas, Models, and Data Studio automatically scopes to that community — there's no separate per-page community filter to manage. The sidebar shows the active community's name as a subtitle under the Communities link, and hovering the link shows "filtering by {community}"; click it to go back and change or clear it.

Creating a community

Click + New community in the top right of the Communities page, enter a name, and confirm. You become the owner of the new community.

Accepting an invitation

Pending invitations appear on the Communities page below your active communities. Click Accept to join or Decline to dismiss.

Community detail page

Click any community card to open its detail page. At the top you can see your role in that community, the total number of members, and the number of teams. The page has these tabs:

  • Community chart — a visual map of the community's structure (see below)
  • Members — everyone in the community; owners and managers can invite new members here
  • Shared assets — all assets shared at the community level, including projects, schemas, data documents, and models
  • Shared projects — projects shared with a team, shown as cards; use the team selector to filter by team. Any schemas and data documents shared within each project appear nested under the project card. Inherited access (via a parent team) is indicated with an Inherited badge
  • Changelog — a history of changes made within the community

Community chart

The Community chart tab (the default view) shows the full team hierarchy as connected node cards, with the community at the top and sub-teams branching down. Click any node to select it — a detail panel appears below showing the Members and Shared assets for that specific team.

The shared assets within a node are visible to all community members; if you are not a member of that specific team, you will see an access error rather than the asset list.

Teams

Teams sit inside a community and let you share resources with a group of people at once. The team structure is managed entirely from the Community chart tab.

Managing teams

Owners and managers can use the ⋯ menu on any node in the community chart to:

  • Add sub-team — create a child team under the selected node
  • Rename — rename the selected team
  • Move — reassign the team to a different parent (also available by dragging a node onto another)
  • Delete — remove the team (only possible if it has no sub-teams)

The community itself sits at the top of the chart and isn't a team, so its node offers only Add sub-team. To rename the community, use the pencil button beside its name in the page header.

To add or remove members from a specific team, click the team's node in the community chart and use the Members tab in the detail panel below.

Access Roles

When you share a resource, the person you share it with gets one of three roles:

Role What they can do
Owner Full control — view, edit, run, share, and publish
Editor Can co-edit the resource directly — no need to copy it first
Viewer Read-only access — can view and run, but cannot edit or share

Sharing Resources

Sharing works across projects, canvases, schemas, data documents, models, and Co-Engineer chats — all through the same Share dialog.

How to share

The dialog has two sides: Add access on the left, where you grant access, and Who has access on the right, listing everyone who already has it.

  1. Open the resource you want to share (project, canvas, schema, data document, model, or Co-Engineer chat).
  2. Click the ⋯ menu and select Share.
  3. Under Add access, confirm which community you're sharing into. If you belong to more than one, pick it from the dropdown at the top of the card — you can share into any of your communities without switching workspaces.
  4. Choose who to add — pick one of the three tabs, and set the role (Editor or Viewer) from the Role dropdown beside them:
Tab How it works
People Search community members by name or email and click to add
Team Pick a team from the tree — access flows down to all sub-teams
Domain Enter an email domain (e.g. example.com) — any community member with that domain gets access

To share with your whole community at once, click Share with everyone next to the community name. This gives every member Viewer access, and the button then reads Shared community-wide; adjust individual roles afterwards from the Who has access list.

Access is given immediately as you add people. Click Close when done.

Who can manage sharing. For projects and Co-Engineer chats, owners and editors can share. For canvases, schemas, data documents, and models, only the owner can — editors cannot reshare. Making a resource public is owner-only in every case, even where editors can otherwise share it. Without permission to manage sharing you still get the dialog, read-only, to see who has access.

Who has access

The share dialog shows a Who has access list that groups recipients by audience type:

Group What it shows
Communities Communities with access; a cascade subtitle explains the inherited role
Teams Teams granted access directly
People Individual members with direct access
Domains Email-domain grants, showing the matched domain

Each entry uses an avatar appropriate to its audience type. A subtitle beneath each entry describes the scope of that grant — for example, "Team — includes sub-teams" for a team grant or "Everyone in this community" for a community-wide grant.

Sharing also shares the sources behind your work

When you share a project or an asset (schema, data document, model, or canvas), Protos additively shares the Knowledge Library documents that asset was built from, read-only, with the same people. This lets a collaborator open and reason over the sources behind your work without you sharing your whole library. See Knowledge Library → Sharing for details.

Making a resource public

The Public section of the Share dialog is a wider scope than sharing with your community: a public resource is visible to everyone on Protos, across all communities, not just yours.

Only the resource's owner can change this. Click Make public and an inline confirmation spells out the scope before it takes effect; Make private reverts it. Editors see the button disabled, with a tooltip explaining that it's owner-only.

Discovering Shared Resources

Resource lists for schemas, data documents, and models have scope tabs at the top:

Tab Shows
All Everything you have access to
Mine Resources you own
Shared with me Resources others have shared directly with you
Public Resources that have been made public across Protos

If you've set an active community, Shared with me on these three pages automatically narrows to that community — see Setting an active community.

Canvases don't use these scope tabs — to browse shared or public canvases, click New → Import Canvas, which has its own Shared with Me, Community Canvases, and Public Canvases tabs.

Live Presence

When other members of your community are in the same project, a row of overlapping coloured circles showing each person's initials appears in the top-right of the header bar. It only appears when at least one other person is present — it stays hidden when you're working alone.

Seeing who's in the project

Click the circles to open a dropdown listing everyone currently in the project. Each entry shows the person's name and where they are — for example, "On a simulation canvas" or "On a schema". Click any entry to jump directly to what that person is viewing.

Soft Locks

Soft locks prevent conflicting edits by showing you when a teammate is already editing something. They are advisory — Protos does not block writes, but makes the conflict visible.

Canvas component locks

When a team member opens a canvas component for editing, that component shows a "[Name] is editing" badge. If the Co-Engineer is making the edit on their behalf, it shows "[Name]'s copilot is editing" instead. Other users can still view the component but should wait for the lock to release before editing.

The lock releases automatically when the editor closes the component panel, navigates away, or after roughly 60 seconds of inactivity.

Schema, data document, and model locks

The same lock badge appears on schemas, data documents, and models. When someone opens one of these resources for editing, all other users see the "[Name] is editing" indicator on that resource in the list. The lock releases the same way — on close, navigation, or timeout.

Shared Co-Engineer Chats

Co-Engineer sessions can be shared with community members.

  1. Open a chat session and click Share.
  2. Assign Editor or Viewer access to individuals, teams, or the whole community.
  3. Shared sessions appear under Shared with me in the chat session list.
  4. Viewers see a read-only transcript. Editors can continue the conversation.

When an editor sends a message in a shared session, other editors who have that session open see the message bubble and a "Co-Engineer is responding…" indicator appear right away. Viewers, who see the session through the read-only shared-session viewer, see the message and the completed reply appear together only once the Co-Engineer finishes the turn.

Publishing for External Access

Publications let you share a canvas with people who don't have a Protos account — customers, partners, or reviewers.

A publication is a snapshot of a canvas at a point in time, accessible via a public URL.

What external viewers can do

  • See the canvas parameters and outputs
  • Adjust parameter values and re-run the canvas interactively
  • Choose which data documents feed the canvas. If the canvas has input or data-input components, each one shows a multi-select document picker (limited to the documents matching that component's schema). Viewers tick which documents to feed in and re-run against their own selection.
  • View and edit the underlying data when the owner has enabled the Data tab. It exposes the linked documents' field values, which viewers can adjust and re-run against.
  • Star the publication as helpful. A star toggle in the sidebar (tooltip: "Did you find this helpful?") lets a viewer mark the canvas helpful, with the total shown next to it.

When a viewer changes a parameter, an input, or a data document, the results on screen are out of date with respect to those edits, so the canvas shows "Values changed — run again to see updated results." Running the canvas clears the hint, and so does putting a changed value back to what it was.

External models can make a canvas view-only. The re-run abilities above apply to any canvas the owner left runnable. If a canvas includes a model that calls an external provider, the owner chooses at publish time whether viewers may run it; if they don't opt in, that entire canvas is view-only — parameter changes and data-document selections can't be re-run either. Canvases with no external models are always runnable.

What they cannot see

  • Your Python calculation code (stripped from the snapshot)
  • Other canvases or projects
  • The Knowledge Library or any internal data

How to publish

Publishing is owner-only: only the project's owner sees an active Publish button. For everyone else it's disabled.

  1. Open Simulation Studio from the sidebar. Scroll to the Publications section at the bottom of the canvas list and click Publish.
  2. Give the publication a name.
  3. Select which canvases to include. A canvas can only be included once it has a successful run behind it — until then its checkbox is disabled and reads "Run this canvas to include it." Run the canvas in Simulation Studio, then come back.
  4. Optionally check Include data tab. This adds a separate Data tab to the publication that exposes the linked documents' field values, which viewers can view, edit, and re-run against. (This is separate from the per-input document picker: viewers can choose which documents feed a canvas and re-run whether or not the data tab is on.)
  5. For any canvas that contains an external model, a per-canvas consent toggle appears: "Let viewers run this canvas's external model on your API key. Turn off to make it view-only." It defaults on. Leave it on to let external viewers re-run the canvas — its external models run on your key, billed to you. Turn it off to make that whole canvas view-only (viewers can't re-run it at all).
  6. Optionally set a password for access control. Viewers are then asked for it before the publication opens, and you can change or remove it later.
  7. Click Publish — a shareable URL is generated.

Note: Publications are snapshots — they do not update automatically when you change the canvas. Re-publish to push an update.

Managing a publication

The Publications card in Simulation Studio lists each publication with its canvas count and its helpful-star count. Click a publication's name to open its detail dialog, which shows:

  • Published and Last republished timestamps
  • Included canvases, and a Data tab included badge when that option is on
  • Password — a Protected or No password badge, a field to Set or Update the password, and Remove password to drop it. Copy a password you've just set from the field beside it before you close the dialog: it isn't stored in a form Protos can show you again, so a lost one has to be replaced rather than looked up.
  • Copy link, Open, Re-publish (refresh snapshot), and Delete — deleting stops the shared link working and can't be undone

In a project with no publications yet, members who aren't the owner see "Publications are managed by the project owner." in place of the prompt to publish one.

See Also

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