A Giraffe workspace holds everything your organization is working on: live deals, feasibility studies, client-specific site plans, and the layer libraries behind them. Governance is what decides who can open, edit, or even see that content. Get it right, and a consultant only ever sees the sites they are assigned to. Get it wrong, and one client's numbers turn up in front of another client's team.

Giraffe always defaults to the highest level of control. When you create a project, space, layer, template, content pack, app, or credential, it is private to you. No one else in your workspace can see it, not even people on your own team, until you or an administrator shares it with them.

This holds the same way across every type of content: Projects, Spaces, Layers, Templates, Content Packs, Apps, and Credentials all start closed, and stay closed until someone with permission opens them up.

Content in Giraffe shares a common vocabulary for permission levels, though not every level applies to every type.

The person who creates a project, space, layer, or other object is its Admin by default. Only an Admin, or a workspace administrator, can grant access to anyone else.

See Project Permissions and Space Permissions for the full breakdown of what each level can do.

Every workspace member has a baseline permission level for the whole workspace, set when they are invited: Admin, Edit, View, or Guest. See Member Permissions for what each workspace-wide level allows. This baseline only applies to members of your own workspace.

Sharing a specific project, space, or other piece of content is a separate mechanism, and it reaches further than your own workspace. You can share directly with anyone who has a Giraffe account, whether they belong to your workspace or are licensed in a different one entirely. Someone outside your workspace has no baseline permission with you at all: their access comes only from the level you grant when you share with them.

For members of your own workspace, the two combine. A specific project can grant a member more than their workspace baseline for that one item. A member with View access workspace-wide can still be made an Edit or Admin on a single project, if someone shares that project with them at that level.

Sharing is what turns closed-by-default into the right people having what they need. Content in Giraffe is shared one of three ways.

When you are not sure what level to grant someone, start with View. You can raise it to Edit or Admin later if they need to make changes.

Workspace administrators are the one exception to closed-by-default. On an Enterprise account, a workspace administrator can turn on audit mode to see, edit, share, or delete any project or space in the workspace, whether or not it has been shared with them. See How to see all projects in a workspace.

Audit mode exists for oversight: cleaning up stale permissions, checking who has access to what, or stepping in on someone else's project. A workspace administrator turns it on deliberately. Outside audit mode, an administrator sees the same closed-by-default workspace as everyone else.

Everything above assumes the other person has a Giraffe account, in your workspace or another one. To let anyone view a project without an account, publish it instead of sharing it. See Publish Projects.

Some of what is described above depends on your account tier: Core, Team, or Enterprise. Guest access, Team-based and workspace-wide sharing, and audit mode are not available on every tier. See Sharing by Tier.