Sharing

Sharing decides who else can read one of your items. It never decides who can change it: whatever the level, an item is edited by the person who created it and by the organization’s admins and owners.

You set the level from the page of the item, or straight from the Sharing column of the Datastore listing. There is no Save button: picking a level applies it.

The four levels

Level	Who can read the item
Private	You, plus the organization’s admins and owners.
Group	The members of the groups you select.
Organization	Every active member of your organization.
Public	Every active member of your organization, and the item may then be served outside it, see below.

A viewer who can read an item reads it and opens the maps built on it, but cannot take the data out of the organization.

Groups compose with the level

Under the four levels sits a group audience, and it applies to every level except Private. With Group, it is the audience itself: the item is readable by the groups you pick, and nothing is saved until you pick at least one. With Organization or Public, picking groups is optional and files the item under those groups’ sections as well, which is how people find it.

If your organization has no groups yet, an admin creates them on the Team page.

What Public actually changes

Inside your organization, Public and Organization give the same reading right. The difference shows when the item leaves the organization:

• A web map published to everyone requires every layer it shows to be Public. If one layer is narrower, the map cannot be opened to that audience.
• A layer exposed through a public OGC service is reachable with that service’s rules.

So Public is what you set on a layer when you intend the map or the service built on it to be readable beyond your organization. Setting it on its own does not put your data on the open internet.

Sharing a web map

A web map carries two separate decisions, and the dialog shows both.

Sharing in the builder is who can open the map in the Map Builder. Changing it lists the map’s layers and offers to move them with the map, which is almost always what you want: a map shared with a group whose layers stay private opens empty for those people. Layers that must change are ticked for you. A layer created by someone else is listed but greyed: it is not yours to share, and its owner has to do it.

Published map audience is who sees the map at its published address. It appears once the map is published. Publishing itself stays in the Map Builder, where you choose the address and see the preview. See Publishing.

Restricting something that is in use

Narrowing the sharing of an item that a published map depends on is the one change that can break something for other people. ALIGN does not let it happen quietly: before writing, it names the published maps that would lose the item, and waits for you to confirm.

The same applies the other way around. When you widen a published map’s audience, ALIGN names the layers that are shared more narrowly than the new audience and offers to open them in one move.

This is why the What uses what card on an item’s page is worth a look before you change anything: it tells you who would feel it.

Who can change the sharing

The person who created the item, and the organization’s admins and owners. Every change is checked again by the ALIGN servers when it is written, so what you see offered is what you are allowed to do.

Related pages

• The page of an item: where the sharing card sits, and what else the item carries.
• Roles & permissions: what each role may do.
• Publishing: putting a map at a public address.