Outline gives workspace admins a set of controls for who can get in, what they can do once inside, how AI tools touch the knowledge base, and a record of everything that happened. This page brings them together in one place; follow the links for detail on each feature.

Access and roles

Governance starts with who has an account and what their role allows.

• Roles. Every member is an Admin, Editor, Viewer, or Guest. Admins manage the workspace, billing, and integrations; Editors can create and edit; Viewers can read and comment; Guests see nothing unless it is explicitly shared with them. See Users & roles.

• Default role. Under Settings → Security you choose the role new accounts receive. Changing it does not affect existing members.

• Require invites. When enabled, people must be invited before they can create an account through SSO. Use this when your identity provider covers more people than should have access to the knowledge base.

• Allowed domains. Restrict sign-up to specific email domains. See Allowed domains.

• Who can invite. Decide whether editors can invite others or only admins can.

• Leavers. Suspend rather than delete. Suspending blocks login, ends active sessions, frees the billed seat, and keeps all documents and history attributed. Deleting is permanent and strips the person's identity from everything they wrote. Members removed from your identity provider are logged out on their next page load, but still need suspending to release the seat.

• Groups. Use Groups to grant collection access in bulk and keep permissions reviewable as people move teams.

Content and sharing controls

Also under Settings → Security, these settings limit how far content can travel.

• Public document sharing. Allow or prevent members publishing documents to the open internet. When disabled, existing public links stop working. See Sharing.

• Viewer document exports. Hide download and export options from viewers so read-only access stays read-only.

• Commenting. Restrict who can comment on documents.

• Personal documents, collection creation, workspace creation. Control whether editors can create private documents, new collections, or entirely new workspaces.

• Email address visibility. Limit who in the workspace can see other members' email addresses.

• Users can delete account. Decide whether members can remove their own account.

AI controls

AI features are opt-in and managed under Settings → AI. Nothing is indexed or exposed to an AI model until an admin turns it on.

• AI answers. Enables semantic indexing of the workspace so search can answer natural-language questions. The index respects document permissions: people only get answers drawn from documents they can already read. Outline does not train on workspace data, and the model provider does not train on data sent through its API. See Search & answers.

• MCP server. Lets members connect AI assistants such as Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor to the workspace through the Model Context Protocol. Turning this off blocks every MCP client for every member. Each connection authenticates as a specific member and inherits that member's permissions, so an assistant can never read or edit more than the person using it. See MCP.

• Application access. Members can review and revoke the third-party and internal applications connected to their account under Settings → API & Access → Application access. Revoking removes the application's token immediately.

API keys

API keys carry selected permissions of the member who created them, so they deserve the same scrutiny as a login.

• By default any non-guest member can create personal API keys. Admins can restrict creation to admins only; when restricted, existing member-created keys are revoked.

• Give keys a descriptive name and an expiry. Expired and unused keys are cleaned up automatically.

• Workspaces include an admin view of every API key in the workspace under Settings → API, with the owner, last-used date, and a revoke action.

• Prefer OAuth for applications that act on behalf of individual members (including MCP clients); reserve API keys for service integrations.

Audit log

Everything above produces an event, and the audit log is where you review them.

• Outline records account access, document activity, and settings changes, with the actor, IP address, and authentication type for each event.

• Admins can browse and filter the log from Settings → Audit Log by event type, IP address, or actor.

• Events are retained for one year. Configurable retention is coming.

• The same data is available programmatically through the events namespace of the API, which is the easiest way to stream it into a SIEM or compliance tool. Webhooks can push events to your systems in near real time.

See Audit log for details.