Sharing individual items

skatch
skatch
Community Member

I have a 1Password family subscription, and over time as more family members have joined, I've found that shared vaults don't handle my sharing needs very elegantly. I'm sure this has come up on these forums before, but I couldn't find discussions after a bit of searching, so here goes:

Vaults are great for long term sharing needs. E.g. my partner and I have a couple shared vaults for joint accounts and credentials we both need access to.

But I'm not going to have vaults for every permutation of family member, so this isn't great when I need to quickly share an item with someone I don't have a vault with. E.g. if I need to give my credit card details to my brother so he can buy something on my behalf, I can:

  • Create a vault that just he and I have access to
  • Or, move my credit card details to the general Shared vault that everyone in the account has access to

The first option involves too much overhead. I have to name it, set up access, and move the item. Then I have to move it back to my private vault when he's done, and probably delete the vault too. The second option isn't ideal for obvious reasons.

What I really want to do is grant him access to an individual item in one of my vaults, and revoke it at some later point.

It quickly gets more complicated the more family members are involved. Let's say I have a login in the vault I share with my partner. If I need to share it with another family member, I'd either have to move it to the general Shared vault, temporarily revoke my partner's access so I can move it to a vault I'm sharing with just that family member, or create a vault shared by the 3 of us for just that one item.

In short: sharing individual items would be useful, in addition to vaults.

I'm aware that what I'm asking would probably involve a lot of hard, fundamental changes to the product. But I figured I'd put this out there in case others have the same need.

Comments

  • Hey @skatch

    In short: sharing individual items would be useful, in addition to vaults.

    For sure. No argument here. :)

    I'm aware that what I'm asking would probably involve a lot of hard, fundamental changes to the product.

    Also correct. The UI work on the client side alone sounds a bit daunting. That said, as we've posted about elsewhere, we're moving to a common shared codebase ("core") built in the Rust programming language that will make these kinds of fundamental changes more feasible. It'll be more feasible because we'd only have to write the business logic once, instead of for each supported platform. There would still likely be UI work to do at least for desktop + mobile. There would also very likely be work to be done on the server side. Eliminating the redundancy in the business logic aspect for the clients would be huge, though.

    But I figured I'd put this out there in case others have the same need.

    There absolutely are. I still find myself in camp "just make a vault" most of the time, but I can empathize with your scenario of short term sharing with one individual. Hopefully it is something we can make a reality, and as I say I think it'll be a more realistic possibility once we're using the core everywhere.

    Ben

  • skatch
    skatch
    Community Member

    Thanks for the response Ben. Interesting to hear about moving to a common codebase for the business logic. I can only imagine how much the work has grown as clients have multiplied over the years, so that sounds like a big undertaking and a huge win when it’s done.

    I can guess that even once there's a common core, something like this would be a significant undertaking. But I’m glad to know these ideas about sharing are percolating, and may be something that’s (more) feasible at some point in the future.

  • ag_ana
    ag_ana
    1Password Alumni

    Indeed @skatch, this should make things a bit easier. And thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and feedback about this!

This discussion has been closed.