A new model for sharing projects

We made a large strategic error with our first version of Kerika: we decided to allow users to share individual items on a page rather than the entire page. This was one of those ideas that sounded really great in theory but bombed in practice: everyone that we talked to during the prototyping and market research stages of Kerika liked the theoretical advantages of the original model, which allowed for very precise control over what you shared, and with whom.

As a result, our original model (which is still buried deep in the Kerika code), managed access permissions at the individual object-level, which was very fine-grained indeed. So much so that after attaching a note to a document you could share the note differently than the way you shared the document itself!

This was an expensive error on our part, because the original coding was very difficult, time-consuming and error-prone. Soon after we got our original beta versions in the hands of some early users (starting around Dec 2005), we realized quickly most people simply couldn't handle this level of low-level setting of permissions. In reality, most people simply wanted to share an entire project, with all of its constituent pages, documents, shapes, notes, etc., with their team mates.

Reversing this decision took a huge amount of effort on our part, which is why version 1.1 took so long to get done, because we had to create another layer of permissions control that allowed users to manipulate projects rather than individual objects. The original low-level controls are still there; it's just that you don't see them any more because the Share Project button does a lot of processing in the background to take care of all the permissions on individual items.

So here we are... with version 1.1 you can share an entire project with one action, rather than sharing individual items one-by-one. One consequence of this new model is that whenever you add a new item to a shared project, e.g. you add a new document to an Idea Page that you are sharing, this new item will automatically get shared with the rest of the team. (In the old model you had to take two actions: first add the document, and then share the document.)

What do you think? Is the new model better than the old? Does anyone really miss the old capability of sharing items one-by-one?