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Outreach Content Governance Overview

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Objective

This article is intended to provide an overview of Content Governance within the Outreach platform.

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Content Governance is a brand new governance capability being introduced by Outreach that will allow organizations to restrict access to Sequences, Templates, and Snippets only to users that should be able to see them.
This can be achieved by putting these sequences, templates, and snippets into a Collection and then associating that Collection with a Team of users.
One Team can be associated with multiple Collections and one Collection can be assigned to multiple Teams.
This means:
  • Users, admins, and content managers in your organization will be able to create these access control boundaries around content (through Content Collections) and allow access only to specific groups of users (Teams)
  • Note that admins will need to provide non-admins with the appropriate Teams and Collection management permissions
  • End users will now only have the most relevant content inside their content experiences instead of having to make sense of all content shared with the entire organization
  • Content Governance will be an additional access control capability that can be used in conjunction with the existing Role Based Access Control capabilities Outreach already provides
  • Once the Teams-Collections boundaries have been set up, the same access controls boundaries will be enforced on the Sequences, Templates, and Snippets associated with the Collection

Applies To

  • Content Governance
  • Outreach Admins

Overview

Outreach Governance Models

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Content Governance is a backward-compatible, opt-in feature that admins would need to enable in their organizations before users can use it. It is also fully compatible with the existing RBAC settings you have put in place.

Sharing content with others in the organization

Content Governance doesn’t affect any existing RBAC settings. Rather it’s an additional capability for organizations that want to use Teams and Collections as a primary or secondary mechanism for sharing content within their organization.
As an example, currently, users have the ability to keep Sequences, Templates, and Snippets they own, private to themselves or share it with their entire organization.
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Note: Snippets does not support Others can only see it option.

Going forward users will have two choices on how they want to share content:
  • If Content Governance has not been enabled, users can mark their owned content as Others can only see it or Others can see and use it to provide access to anyone in the organization
  • If Content Governance has been enabled, the content must be put into one or more Collections and associated with one or more Teams to allow access to other users
  • Users still have the option to share content with everyone in the organization through Public Collection.

Notes:

  • Content can be put into Collections irrespective of whether they have been marked as ‘Private to owner, Others can only see it or Others can see and use it.
  • However, private content won’t be visible to the user unless they have permission to view it through RBAC.
  • This means, effectively, only content that has been marked as ‘Shared’ can be accessed purely through the Teams-Collections association.
  • One exception to the sharing rule described is when the user wants to actually use the content. At that point, we’ll enforce the content owners original sharing intent - ‘only see it’ vs. ‘see and use it’. This is to ensure relevancy to the user using the content as the owner of the content thought appropriate.

Associating Teams to Collections

There are no changes in behavior. Users with appropriate permissions will continue to have the ability to associate content to Collections.
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Similarly, users with appropriate permissions will continue to have the ability to associate Teams to Collections and vice versa.
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However, once Content Governance has been enabled, access to content within those Collections will be restricted to the user’s Teams memberships only.

New Public Collection

Teams-Collections allow users to share specific content with specific groups of users across the organization, but what if they want to share content with the entire organization?
To facilitate this, we’re introducing a Public collection. Any content associated with the Public collection will be available to everyone in the organization.
Note: Going forward, the name Public (as typed) will be reserved by Outreach as a system-owned collection name and cannot be changed or deleted by admins or end users. No new collections will be allowed to have this reserved name either.

Procedure

Content Governance feature can be enabled per profile and per content type - Sequences, Templates, and Snippets.
  1. Log in to Outreach as an Admin.
  2. Navigate Settings > Profiles > Choose a profile > Scroll to the Sequence/Template/Snippet section > And uncheck the following checkbox
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Additionally, if you can also allow specific profiles to have the ability to manage Teams and Collections, you can go to Settings > Profiles > Choose a profile > Check/uncheck the following permission as required
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This will allow the end users to be able to associate their Sequences, Templates and Snippets to Collections and then those Collections to Teams.
None of the governance boundaries apply to admins, they will continue to have unrestricted access to Sequences, Templates, Snippets, Collections and Teams. This includes the ability to fully manage content they don’t own.

Admin checklist

Assuming your organization has been compliant with Outreach’s RBAC guidelines, we expect none to minimal work on Admins.
However, as with all things governance and access control, it’s always prudent to be careful and deliberate as you enable the Content Governance feature for your organization.
  • Remember, backward compatibility works only if you start right with access controls
  • Ensure Profiles, and permissions within, are set up correctly; use principle of least privilege
  • Practice on a sandbox or testing environment
  • Communicate clearly with users on the upcoming changes
  • Ensure appropriate Profiles have been assigned to appropriate users
  • Double check Team memberships and Collection content
  • Enable → Validate → Validate → Validate

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Does this replace RBAC?
A: No. Teams-Collections can be used in addition to RBAC controls.
Q: My org is not ready yet, can we wait or at least go slow?
A: Yes. The feature is opt-in by design. It’s ready when you are.
Q: What content types are supported in this release?
A: Sequences, Templates and Snippets can be added to Collections in this release. Other types can be added through future roadmaps if there’s popular demand.
Q: Can I disable ‘Public’ Collection?
A: ‘Public’ Collection is a system construct and cannot be disabled.
Q: What happens to my existing Collections named ‘Public’?
A: The name ‘Public’ will be reserved going forward and new collections can’t be named ‘Public’ anymore. Existing collections called ‘Public’ will be retained till you need to edit it, then the name would need to be changed.
Q: How do I delegate Teams and/or Collection management responsibilities?
A: Teams-Collections management permissions are controlled through Profiles. Create the appropriate Profiles you need and assign to the appropriate user.
Q: How do I rollback this feature?
A: You can reverse the feature by performing the enablement steps in reverse.

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