Dusty Portal: User Roles and Project Sharing

This release introduces new user roles and project-sharing capabilities in Dusty Portal, designed to make collaboration smoother and access more secure. It's now simpler to use Portal as a seamlessly collaborative digital workspace for all project stakeholders to work together in coordinating your layout, while protecting project information from inappropriate access or accidental changes. Access can be managed at the project level, simplifying your workflows and improving security.

Admins within organizations can now control the visibility of individual projects, so that external contractors only have access to the specific projects that they are involved in. Regardless if you’re inviting trades to collaborate on multi-trade layout, a GC to gain visibility into the layout process, or a third-party VDC team to help coordinate the model, each person only has access to the project information they need, and nothing more.

Collaborators get an integrated view of all the projects they’re working on in one place, without the need to manage multiple logins. This means no more managing separate login details for each project you’re invited to participate in.

New Capabilities

• Project Sharing: Invite guest members to specific projects. Share layouts and project data with users outside your organization without granting full access to your entire organization.
• Single ID: Users can now access projects across multiple organizations using a single Dusty ID.
• Granular Access Control: Assign edit or view permissions for individual projects.
• Eliminate Multiple Accounts: No need for multiple Dusty accounts to manage access across organizations.
• New Project Guest Roles: Assign roles to external collaborators on a project-by-project basis.

Roles Overview

Previously, access in Dusty Portal was all-or-nothing for an entire organization. Some customers created separate organizations just to manage access, and some users had to juggle multiple Dusty accounts.

Every user has a single home organization. They can edit all information in their home organization and they can manage users if they are an Org Admin.

Guest users belong to another home organization and can be granted edit or view access to specific projects as needed.

When a user is deactivated in their home organization, they are also deactivated in any other organization where they had guest access.

Migration Details

All existing users will see updated role names with no change to their permissions. Their roles will be changed to:

• Admin → Org Admin
• User → Org Editor

The new project guest roles will be available for Org Admins to assign to new users as needed. To convert existing Org Editors who are external contractors to project guest roles, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager with a list of which identities should be converted and how you would like them to be updated.

Additional Notes

Sharing a Project with external contractors or consultants: Ensure the user is added to another organization before sharing a project. To be a Project Guest Viewer or Editor, the user must be an Org Admin or Org user within another Org in the Dusty Portal.

Deactivated Users: Deactivated users will receive a “wrong password/username” error when trying to log in.

Prepare Layout for Viewers: Project Guest Viewers may see an empty layout if a file has been uploaded before it has been prepped.

Compatibility

The new roles apply to Dusty Portal and the latest AutoCAD plugin. Project Guest Editors must use the latest AutoCAD or Revit plugin to upload to Portal. 

Managing Access and Support Documentation

As an Org Admin, you now have a new interface to manage user roles and project access. You can add new users to your organization and manage guest access for external collaborators. Org Admins can also add Org Editors.

Add a new project guest member:

1. Select a project in your org.
2. Open project settings.
3. Navigate to the Guest Members tab.
4. Click +Member.
5. Enter the email address of a user that is in another org. And assign a role.
6. Save and add.
7. New guests will get an email to alert them that they have access to a new project.

Remove a project guest member:

1. Select a project in your org.
2. Open project settings.
3. Navigate to the Guest Members tab.
4. Click remove.

As a user, you’ll see all projects in your home organization where you have edit access. If you’re a guest user in another organization, you’ll also see those projects, with either edit or view permissions.

Floor Elevation Beta Updates

• New ability to export a CSV for floor elevation heat map.
• Bug fix for when the floor elevation reporting was incorrect in some cases.