Dealing with large numbers of items/vaults
We have been testing 1Password for Teams with a couple members of our company and slowly moving logins in from our existing home-grown solution. So far it's been going well but we are beginning to see some possible issues. Let me explain.
Navigating Many Vaults
Our development team needs to share the large number of logins that we store for each of our clients. So far we have been creating a separate vault per client that acts as a container for the logins required for that specific client's projects. This concept seems to work well and follows what I've seen your team do here:
Our concern is that we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 clients or vaults that we'll ultimately need to move into 1Password for Teams. Have you considered how the various vault interfaces will work with that many vaults? I could see it becoming unwieldy very quickly...even with the number of vaults in the screenshot.
One suggestion from our team would be to make the vault selection areas an autocomplete search box rather than a dropdown selection menu. Another interesting suggestion from the team would be to build in the ability to filter search results using various tokens.
Example: $client1 email login. Entering the phrase into a search bar would only return results matching "email login" stored in the "client1" vault.
Importing Entries
Our second issue is also a result of having so many client projects to keep logins for. Our current system probably contains 4-5k entries. Migrating these entries into 1Password by hand would be quite daunting. I believe there is a way to import entries via a CSV file. Is there any documentation on this? These 4-5k entries are of a variety of types and would be imported into the 500 different vaults. Can this be done via a single CSV file?
We'd love to hear your thoughts. Thanks for the amazing work so far!
1Password Version: 6.0.BETA-5
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: OS X 10.11.2
Sync Type: Dropbox
Comments
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@petemcw ,
I'll address your CSV importing question, and will leave the others to AgileBits.
You can import CSV, as per the instructions in How to create a 1Password compatible CSV file. 1Password for OS X can import 4 types via CSV: Login, Credit Card, Software License and Secure Notes. These must be imported one-category per CSV file.
There is a generic csv converter in the converter suite which can import to Login items currently. It is more flexible than the 1Password CSV importer, however. I'm happy to add support for additional categories for you.
I don't believe there is a way to create new vaults on import, so you're stuck creating all the vaults you need.
The converter suite has an option to add TAGs during the conversion process. It would be trivial to script a sequence of conversions that add a given tag (perhaps based on your input file or client's name), and you could then create one giant 1PIF file to import, and move items to separate vaults based on those TAG values.
Does this help, at least a little?
Edit: another user asked for the ability to support a Tags column. I've posted a CSV converter that supports a Tags column, and the cell values are a list of zero or more comma-separated tags values to be used as 1Password Tags.
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This is a very interesting scenario, @petemcw!
Does everyone need access to all of the 500 vaults?
There are currently two ways of hiding the vaults without losing access to them:
- Use Preferences > All Vaults to select the vaults that should be displayed in All Vaults view. That would still allow you to see these vault but you will have to switch to it first.
- Change vault permissions to Manage only. That would prevent the vault from being available on the client devices but it will be possible to restore access to it by changing the permissions back to Read/Write.
I like the idea of including the vault name in the search and will pass it on to our team.
It appears that you have about 10 items for each client? What about using use a single vault for more than one client? Then you could assign tags for each client and search items by the tag.
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You can import CSV, as per the instructions in How to create a 1Password compatible CSV file. 1Password for OS X can import 4 types via CSV: Login, Credit Card, Software License and Secure Notes. These must be imported one-category per CSV file.
Thanks for the direction. Between the official link and your converter tool we should have what we need to import our data.
Does everyone need access to all of the 500 vaults?
Not all developers need access to all 500 vaults. Currently more people have access than technically should but its a limitation of our existing tool. That being said, there are a few of us that would need access to everything.
It appears that you have about 10 items for each client?
That would be true for a view clients. Some have less than 10 and some have 30 or more. It's pretty much all over the place.
What about using use a single vault for more than one client? Then you could assign tags for each client and search items by the tag.
We are trying this method as well. The problem we are running into is with naming items and finding them afterward. Like in other feedback I've seen in the forum, we have specific item types that require certain fields to be filled out properly and 1Password doesn't let us do that. In this scenario we would need to require item titles to include certain information and because we can't enforce it via the software we would have to rely on humans to always get it right.
The other issue we have run into in this scenario is searching/finding items. In this case we would have potentially thousands of items in the main vault shared by developers. So far the basic search hasn't been good enough because it only searches the item title. While we can search the other fields using the advanced search, it is a pain to open it up and configure each time someone would search...which would be every time they use the application. Inside 1Password 6-BETA we have noticed that we can't save the searches anymore either which might help.
If we could require a field called "Client Name" and more fields were included in the default search, storing all items in a single vault would not be a big problem.
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Hi @petemcw,
Thanks for the additional information. I really like the idea of having a concept of required fields. It's not exposed as a feature yet, but the backend of 1Password for Teams allows for customization of category templates. So it would technically be possible for us to add the ability for the server to dictate which fields are required and have the clients listen to that. We aren't there yet though.
Saved Searches don't work 1Password for Mac when using Teams because Saved Searches are considered Folders, and Folders didn't make it into 1Password for Teams. I'd love for us to rework Saved Searches such that it works in a Teams vault though. We want to rebuild that in such a way that it can be properly synced across platforms. Currently our implementation on the Mac is 100% Mac-only in how it works.
I think for the time being we don't have a magic solution for what you're looking for. I think the best way forward would be to use Tags for each client, which would allow you to get to them easily via the sidebar in the main app or via the Tags section in mini. It'd require humans to do the correct thing, which is admittedly not going to be perfect for a very large set of items.
Thanks for the feedback, and I hope we can make some of this stuff easier for you in future releases.
Rick
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