10 min read

Managing Doc Makers for admins

Enterprise admin best practices for effectively managing Doc Maker licenses for your team.

Some features mentioned are only available on the Enterprise plan.

Maker billing: the key to your success.

At Coda, we strive for the most fair, lowest friction billing model. Unlike other tools where you have to pay for every user, with Coda’s Maker billing, you only pay for the users who are doing the heavy lifting. Editors are free. Workspace admins have the power to assign Doc Maker licenses. Read on for guidance on making that decision.

A walkthrough from our Customer Success Team

A quick note on role definitions:

  • Editors can collaborate in existing docs and pages, including adding, editing, deleting tables and views, and writing formulas. They can also add and configure integrations (Packs) and automations.
  • Doc Makers can do everything editors can and also create & manage docs, pages, and folders in the workspace, and use Coda AI.
To learn more about the different roles and their abilities check out this comprehensive article.
What you'll get:
  • How to allocate doc maker licenses.
  • How to maintain licenses over time.
  • How to manage requests and approvals
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You'll use:
  • Workspace settings
  • SCIM (optional for Enterprise)

Considerations when allocating Doc Maker licenses for the first time.

Identify power users

Power users are those who actively create and maintain important documents, databases, or workflows within your organization. They have a good understanding of Coda's features and are eager to contribute to the growth of Coda across the company. These will be your champions. Typically, every team using Coda has a handful of power users.

Consider departmental needs

Assess the needs of different departments or teams within your organization. Some teams may require more Doc Maker licenses due to their heavy reliance on cross-functional collaboration, project management, or data analysis. Engage with department heads or team leads to understand their requirements and ensure that allocations are aligned with their specific needs.

Reduce bottlenecks

Consider reserving a few licenses for individuals who demonstrate high collaboration and ownership within teams. While these individuals may not be power users, providing them with a Doc Maker license will help them reduce bottlenecks that may arise from a single Doc Maker model where the entire team relies on one individual to create docs, name docs, and add pages within docs.

Maintain licenses over time.

Training and support

Before you or any of your team members start building or executing in Coda, we strongly encourage you to take our course(s) in Coda fundamentals. We offer a mix of interactive webinars and guided training that you can take at your own pace.

Promote collaboration

Success is contagious, and fostering a culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing among your Doc Makers (and editors!) can have a significant impact on achieving success with Coda. When Doc Makers have the opportunity to learn from each other, they are more likely to excel in their Coda skillset. For example, one Doc Maker might share how they improved their doc's structure, resulting in better organization and easier navigation. This can inspire others to implement similar improvements in their docs.

Flexibility

Coda licensing has flexibility built in. This means that you can always course correct should you find that a different set of users need to be Doc Makers. As a workspace admin, you can upgrade or downgrade any user at any time. Additionally, depending on your workspace settings, editors will have the ability to submit Doc Maker upgrade requests. Learn more here.

Doc Maker requests and approvals.

When setting up Coda, it is important to select which Doc Maker approval process you would like to enact in your workspace. This process will dictate how your users will be able to request access to become a Doc Maker. You have three options:
  • Instant Approval
  • 7-day grace period (recommended)
  • Manual
Learn more about these options and how to select an option here.

FAQs

How do I select my Doc Makers?

While you can always select your Doc Makers manually within the workspace, a better approach for Enterprise customers is to utilize SCIM. SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management) is a set of protocols that allow a third-party Identity Provider to manage users inside Coda for your organization. You can use any identity provider to automatically provision and de-provision users in Coda, based on their roles and application assignments within your Identity Provider.

How can I customize the Doc Maker request message my team sees?

Enterprise-only customers can reach out to our Support Team to inquire about your message customization options.

How do I know if someone has requested to be a Doc Maker?

As an admin, there are a few ways to track Doc Maker requests:
  1. From your workspace home, click on your workspace name in the left panel. Under the workspace name, click on Workspace settings. Enter the Members tab. Here you'll see any members with pending Doc Maker requests at the top of the list, with Approve and Decline buttons to the right of their name.
  2. So long as you are subscribed, you will receive a daily email report that summarizes activity for each day, including doc maker requests.
  3. You can leverage the Coda Admin Pack within a Coda Doc to pull all of the doc maker request events. Bonus: set up a Slack or Microsoft Teams automation to alert you each time a doc maker request happens.

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