In Outline, Collections are a way to organize your Workspace into high-level topics. Collections are also the primary place where permissions are handled, it’s often advisable to base collections on areas of your team that might work together. For example, "Product”, “Sales”, or “Marketing”. or more granular areas within a discipline like “Infrastructure”, “Ops”, “Frontend Engineering”.

Create a collection

New collections can be created from the command menu, or the sidebar where the “+ New collection” option appears for all members by default.

When creating a collection you have the option to choose a name, icon, color, default access and also disable public sharing of documents within.

Permissions

Collection menu

Admins can also change permissions on an existing collection, these options can be accessed from the menu in the sidebar, or the collection page. An overview of the available permissions are as follows:

Default access

Default access applies to any team members that have not been explicitly added to the collection, you may choose that there is no default access in which case the collection becomes private and is visible only to team members that are added.

Groups

By adding a group to the collection all of the members of that group will gain the permissions at once, this is a fast and easy way to control access. If your team is larger than 10 members we recommend using groups for access control.

Users

In addition to groups it’s also possible to add individual users to a collection. If a team member is added to a collection as part of a group and individually then the membership with the most permissions will take priority.

This allows you to, for example, add a group of users with the “View only” permission and then also add one member of the group individually with “Edit” or “Admin” permissions.

Organizing collections

As a workspace admin it is possible to reorganize collections in the sidebar using drag and drop, you can choose to keep commonly used collections near the top, for example.

Documents within a collection can also be alphabetically or manually sorted on a per-collection basis. This configuration option is available from the collection menu once a collection has been created (see screenshot above).