Settings and sharing in Notion

Settings and sharing in Notion can be very overwhelming. There’s a share button in the upper right hand corner yet sharing abilities in the settings menu, multiple ways to invite people to your workspace via links, and what the heck is the difference between teamspaces and groups??

If you’re like me, settings and sharing in Notion is one of the hardest things to understand in Notion. I’ve really struggled with it for months. Thankfully, Notion recently launched one of their new certifications, the Settings and Sharing badge certification, that kind of forced me to understand settings and sharing more effectively and prove to myself that I actually knew what I was doing when it comes to sharing in Notion.

I’m happy to say after taking it one time and studying for 30 minutes that I passed with flying colors.

With all of that in mind, let’s cover the basics of settings and sharing in Notion in this post. I’m not going to go in-depth on everything, but this should cover the basics of it all.

To help keep it all organized, I’ve broken this post down into three sections: sharing a page, teamspaces and groups, and settings and members.

Let’s get started with one of the most confusing parts of Notion at times: sharing a page.

Sharing a Page

Sharing a page in Notion can very simple at times and at other times, decently complicated. I’m going to start simple and get more complicated as we go here.

Let’s say you have a basic page in Notion with no linked databases and you just want to share it with people to comment or edit on it like a Google Doc. It’s a basic text page in Notion that you own in your personal workspace. To share it, you would go to the upper right hand corner, select share, and there’s two different ways to share this page.

The first way would be the share the page via email and enter all of the emails that you want to share this page with. When people receive this email and open it up, they have access to this page as a guest. As a guest, you, the workspace owner, can select what permission level they have on this page. This is very similar to Google Docs.

The second way is similar to Google Docs too in that you can just share the page to people as a link. All you have to do is toggle on the “Share to web” and then alter the settings as you want. You’ll see “Allow duplicate as a template” which is automatically toggled on, allow editing and comments which requires people who edit or leave comments to have a Notion account, and search engine indexing which allows Google or any other search engine to find your Notion page.

One cool new feature in these settings that Notion just released that isn’t similar to Google Docs is the expiration date. You can now set when a shareable link expires for guests to have access to it. This could be helpful if you have a key deadline and want to lock a page right at that deadline. No need for you to turn off the link at that deadline manually. That’s pretty sweet. The manual option could also just look like you removing them as a guest from the page.

You can always remove people from a page if you are the workspace owner. If you give someone full access to a page, they can share the page with others and add people as guests.

One tricky part to Notion is the differences between guests and members. When you share a page in Notion, they’re automatically added as a guest, not a member unless they have an “allowed domain” (more on that later). Members are important because those are paid accounts to Notion.

If you’re paying for Notion, you can have unlimited guests to a page or workspace. If you’re not paying for it, you can only have 5 guests to your entire workspace.

Notion’s Personal Pro plan is only $5/month and is free if you have a .edu email address.

The last thing to keep in mind when sharing pages is if you have any sub pages. Sub pages take on the same properties as the parent page. So, if you have sub pages in that page, everything will share nicely. However, if you have a page that you are linking to from a different parent page that isn’t shared with a guest, the guest you shared the page with won’t be able to see the linked page unless they have access. This is especially crucial if you have templates in Notion.

So those are the two main ways to share a single page, especially when it comes guests to a workspace. Let’s move on to talking about settings and sharing when it comes to members, groups, and teamspaces.

Groups and Teamspaces

Groups and Teamspaces can be pretty confusing, especially because teamspaces are relatively new to Notion. You can think of teamspaces as a “workspace-within-a-workspace”. You can think of groups as the same level of permission. Teamspaces and groups are not the same thing. They do work really nicely together though.

Teamspaces are kind of like mini-workspaces in a single workspace. This is really helpful for larger organizations where there’s many different teams. You can have a teamspace for engineering and another for marketing. Everyone in those teams can then be part of those teamspaces and at least see what’s going on in that teamspace.

Where Groups are helpful is subdividing a team in a teamspace or an overall workspace.

For example, you could have senior leadership as a group and then another group of product managers. Instead of adding each of these members individually and changing their permissions individually, groups allow you to mass change permissions and access. So, you could have senior leadership in a teamspace have the ability to edit all of the pages while product managers could edit most pages but other company pages could only be viewable to them. If you add a team member, you just have to add them to the right group, rather than trying to figure out all of the right permissions each time.

For teamspaces, there are 3 different types of teamspaces: open, closed, and private. Open teamspaces are open to everyone who is a member of a workspace, closed are workspaces not available to everyone, but everyone at least knows they exist, and private teamspaces are closed but not everyone knows they exist.

Teamspaces are pretty powerful no matter what team plan you are on, but a lot of the value seems to be if you are an enterprise customer. You have teamspaces in both team pricing plans in Notion, but there’s a lot more in the enterprise plan. This makes sense as Notion is probably trying to entice more and more customers to be enterprise customers.

Some of the most significant features included only in the enterprise plan are single sign on, the ability to have a membership admin, private teamspaces, and advanced security controls (like having the ability to disable guests or exports of information from Notion)

Let’s now move onto the last section and lefthand side of Notion: Settings & Members.

Settings & Members

When you click on the “Settings & Members” tab in Notion, there’s 3 main areas to keep an eye out on when it comes to sharing and settings: settings, teamspaces, and members.

In settings, you can create a custom domain such as “mattgira.notion.site”, you can setup allowed domains where if someone with a particular email domain as their email signs up to your workspace, they’re automatically added as a member. So, in theory, I could have anyone sign up to my own workspace if they have matthewgira.com as their email domain.

You can set a public home page and more importantly if you ever want information out of Notion, you can export content into Markdown & CSV, HTML, or into a PDF if on enterprise. That would be all of your content in the workspace. If you need to export a single page as a PDF, you can do that by just going to the upper right hand corner and clicking on the 3 dots, then selecting export. You don’t need the enterprise plan for a single page.

Back in Settings & Members, in teamspaces, you can set default teamspaces, manage all of your teamspaces, and limit how teamspaces are created in your workspace. Nothing too complicated here.

Members are pretty simple too as you can create an invite link for new team members, add members via email, and manage groups. Pretty simple!

So, there are definitely aspects of settings and sharing in Notion that are simple. The Settings & Members part of Notion are a great example of that. Sharing pages in Notion can be pretty simple, but can also get complicated if you have linked pages or databases.

If you’re looking to get your Notion Settings & Sharing Badge though, this exam is definitely more simple than the Notion Essentials Exam. If you’re using Notion with a team already, the exam will probably be pretty easy. If you’re only using it for individual use, study a little bit, but nothing extravagant.