# Teams and collaboration
When building integrations for an organization, the scale and complexity of the business processes may result in multiple people working on a set of recipes - or even collaborating on a single recipe.
In this section, we cover the teams feature in Workato and how users can easily work together to build, test and manage recipes in a workspace.
# Workato Teams
Workato Teams is built with a vision of facilitating agile and iterative development through collaboration, and at the same time providing tools to admins to govern and keep things secure. Using the Teams features allow:
Role Based Access Control: Admins can set fine grained access control for various assets/objects (e.g. recipes, connections, folders, jobs) and operations (e.g. create, update, and run recipes) are grouped into pre-defined roles.
Custom Roles that fit your business: In addition to the out-of-box roles that admins can use, they can also create custom roles e.g. for Marketing Admin, Marketing Ops.
Work with multiple teams: A single user/account can be part of multiple teams and contribute to building/deploying or operating recipes. Very useful when you have a single admin/expert that needs to govern multiple departments.
Better Security w/ SAML based SSO Access: Instead of creating separate accounts for team members, Workato accounts can be provisioned using SAML based Single Sign On apps like OKTA, OneLogin etc. Centralizes security, faster provisioning and de-provisioning. Workato also allows for Just in time provisioning for custom roles.
Audit Trail: When collaborating, multiple users can work on the same recipe. Hence, it is important to keep an audit trail of the changes. Auto-versioning provides the ability to roll back or roll-forward changes without losing any work.
Recipe Ownership: Recipes created by users as part of a team are owned by the team. When a consultant leaves or an employee changes group/jobs, their contribution to the team doesn't go away with them.
# Differentiating factors
Other tools (Integromat/Tray.io/Zapier etc.) provide basic multi-user access capabilities (capabilities vary by vendor). It is often a collection of accounts under a team owner.
In these tools, the ownership of integrations remain with the account/user that built it. So when a member leaves or their account is removed from the team, the integrations would be lost. In a Workato team, the recipes created or worked on by a collaborator remain even when a they are removed (left the team/company).
In a Workato team, collaborators can be allowed access to specific project folders of recipes. That way, even when a member is on vacation or has left the team, any issues in integrations can be resolved by their team members without needing to wait till they are back or need to be rebuilt. This is unlike other structures where the team owner or other users in the team cannot view/edit or operate the integrations built by another user.
Furthermore, there is role-based access control (RBAC) to give users different, granular permissions. This is a critical feature for lifecycle and change management.
When investing in a feature like teams it is important to understand the team dynamics and how multiple users will collaborate, how admins can govern and protect data/work. Workato Teams translates to more control over data governance, more flexibility in collaboration across team members, and more granularity over security enforcement.
# Accessing the Teams page
For Workato users who are team owners, Admins, or have been given permissions to, they can access the team admin page from the tools menu.
Navigating to Teams
In the team admin screen, team owners can view current collaborators on their team, view pending invitations to collaborators, configure the settings, and setup collaborator roles. Team owners can also invite collaborators to the team.
Teams page
# Invite collaborators
To invite collaborators, provide the full name of the collaborator and their email and then assign them a role.
Invite collaborators
Existing Workato users will be prompted to login to Workato and accept the team invite while new users will be prompted to sign up for a Workato account.
# Switching between personal accounts and team accounts
Team members will be able to view the teams they are collaborating on in their account menu, as well as their roles in the team. Members can toggle to these teams by clicking on the team.
Switch to Team account with Okta authorization
# Leaving a team
To leave a team that you belong to, navigate to the Team memberships tab in the Account settings page and click on 'Leave team' on the team you wish to leave.
When you leave a team, all access to that team will be revoked and you will no longer be able to switch to the team via the team switcher. All recipes and assets that you previously contributed to the team will remain.
The team owner will be notified when a team member leaves their team via email.
Team memberships tab in the settings page
# Tracking changes made by collaborators
When collaborating in a team, changes to recipes and exports/imports made by team members can be tracked. This establishes an audit trail so you can manage your team effectively and ensure they are making changes compliant with your security protocols.
# Recipe versions
Recipe changes are logged under Versions tab and attributed to the collaborator who made the change. Older versions of the recipe can be restored by users with admin or analyst roles.
Recipe audit log in Versions tab
# Exports/imports
Exports and imports to and from your team account during recipe lifecycle management are tracked on the export/import histories pages on every manifest and import folder.
Recipe export history