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Beyond the Basics: Leveraging monday.com Private Workspaces and Item-Level Control
- Ishani Dhar Chowdhury
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
If you're an enterprise organisation, your team is likely to handle a lot of sensitive data daily. For example, businesses can leverage the monday.com use cases to handle employee records, financial forecasts, confidential client projects, etc.
Research indicates that data breaches decreased by 9% since 2024. Even though attackers mostly target small- to medium-sized businesses, large enterprises also make headlines.
Most enterprise breaches occur in remote work environments, underscoring the importance of robust access controls. The monday.com private workspace feature for enterprises addresses such security challenges and delivers excellent enterprise-grade privacy.
Let's learn how you can manage complex team structures and protect sensitive information with monday.com for enterprise.
monday.com Private Workspace: What Makes It Different from Standard Workspaces?
The monday.com private workspace functionality can be classified as a 'closed workspace.' This feature is exclusive to Enterprise plan holders. Moreover, it's ideal for organisations with hundreds of external contractors.
These limit access to monday.com users who join by requesting or by invitation. For instance, it contrasts sharply with an 'open workspace,' which any team member can join or discover.
Being one of the most useful monday.com use cases, the private workspace feature offers the following characteristics:
Main boards within the workspace will remain invisible and uneditable to non-members.
Owners can control all membership requests and determine who can access the closed workspace.
Only invited members can view the workspace boards, columns, automations, integrations, people, items, etc.
Fun Fact: Team members who are subscribed to a specific board in the workspace can access it. However, they won't see anything else in the workspace.
The monday.com private workspace feature ensures contractors can access only designated projects without seeing broader organisational workflows. For example, financial teams can maintain budget confidentiality and also collaborate on specific initiatives.
monday.com Use Cases: The Essentials for Privacy-Critical Departments
In the last quarter, monday.com reported a revenue of USD 316.90 million, up by 26% YoY. With over 245,000 users, this platform provides industry-leading flexibility and customisability.
The best part? It's made for every department and industry. Be it marketing, financial, construction, or government—monday WorkOS for Enterprises has got you covered.
Even then, privacy is paramount across numerous monday.com use cases for various industries. For example, HR departments will leverage the monday.com private workspace for sensitive workflows.
HR Department Application
Here's the thing: HR teams represent one of the most critical monday.com use cases for privacy control. They can utilise the monday.com private workspace features to:
Manage recruitment pipelines with utmost security.
Track sensitive candidate information that needs strict confidentiality.
Onboarding and offboarding processes that contain employee data.
Designated access to reviewers for performance review cycles.
Salary or compensation boards with restricted visibility.
Finance Team Implementation
Your finance department will depend on the monday.com private workspace architecture for confidential operations. They'll manage:
Finance request workflows with multi-tier budget approvals that require different access levels.
Vendor contract negotiations involve competitive pricing data that's kept in a secure workspace.
Audit preparation boards that consolidate compliance documentation are accessible to authorised personnel.
Preventing premature disclosure of strategic financial planning and budget forecasting for executive-level visibility.
As monday.com consultants, our team of 27+ experts at Fruition serves a wide range of industries. These include construction, manufacturing, retail, government, professional services, and more.
We specialise in configuring complex workflows within the monday.com Enterprise features for confidential business data. For companies managing multiple external collaboration accounts, our team will create separate closed workspaces for each client. As a result, this will prevent cross-client information exposure while maintaining operational efficiency.
monday.com Item-Level Permissions vs Board Permissions
Do you know the distinction between monday.com item-level permissions vs board permissions? This becomes critical when managing complex team structures with varying access needs.
The monday.com item-level permissions vs board permissions debate fundamentally changes how enterprises manage access. For instance, board permissions operate at a macro level. Moreover, item-level control provides surgical precision.
Board Permissions
There are four permission sets, including:
Edit everything.
Only edit assigned items.
View or comment.
Only edit content.
These monday.com use cases for board permissions will apply to all members and non-owners uniformly. There are three main board types, namely private, shareable, and main, that determine who can view the boards. Similarly, permissions dictate editing capabilities.
Item-Level Permissions
In the monday.com private workspace for Enterprise plans, you'll get an 'Only edit assigned content' option. It allows limiting board members to edit only assigned items.
This granular control helps create scenarios that would have been impossible with board-level restrictions. Let's understand this with an example:
Consider a project board tracking fifty initiatives. Here, you can customise which people column determines the assignment visibility. For instance, team leads can see all items, but contributors only view assigned tasks.
As a result, you can maintain parallel workstream confidentiality without creating separate boards.
Column Permissions
Beyond item and board controls, there are column permissions. It gives board owners the option to control which column can be edited or seen by members or guests.
Consider this a third permission layer in your monday.com private workspace to address specific data sensitivity. Strategic monday.com column permission uses:
Sensitive note fields that will be restricted to HR personnel.
Personal information fields can be limited appropriately.
Confidential vendor pricing to be hidden from broader project teams.
Financial columns showing budget amounts that are visible to managers.
monday.com Use Case: Practical Application
The monday.com item-level permissions vs board permissions debate resolves the moment we examine real requirements. As monday experts, we'd like to explain this with a use case.
We can help our clients implement compliant configurations with private workspace, item-level control, and other monday.com Enterprise features.
Did you know that multi-level service teams require a robust item-level control in monday WorkOS? Let us explain.
You're a consulting firm. Your team managed 20 client projects on a single board. By enabling item-level permission in your monday.com private workspace, you can allow each consultant to see only their assigned client items. This will prevent information leakage.
In healthcare organisations, there's a need for HIPAA compliance. You'll benefit from the monday.com private workspace and the item-level controls. Therefore, patient case coordination boards will restrict case visibility to assigned members only.
We'll help you combine workspace, item-level, and column permissions to create sophisticated access architectures. Your monday.com private workspace will hence be configured based on desired control. It's a hierarchical permission structure that ensures consistent governance.
Guest Permission in monday.com: The Best Practices for External Management
Enterprises must manage hundreds of external guests. With the right monday.com use cases, you can perform complex access control.
In monday.com guest access, these count as an account seat, making efficient guest management financially important. Non-members indeed provide the most restrictive access option.
With a monday.com private workspace, non-members are invited to specific docs or boards but not to the workspace itself. They can only access items to which they are explicitly subscribed.
As a result, it minimises guest exposure to organisational data. For example, construction firms can leverage such monday.com use cases to grant subcontractors as non-members. That means electrical contractors can only see electrical work items, and plumbers can see plumbing items.
Based on our 15+ years of knowledge and 500+ completed projects, here's a security configuration hierarchy to follow:
Create a monday.com private workspace for external collaborators.
Invite internal teams as workspace members.
Add external contractors as guests or non-members (board subscribers).
Apply item-level permissions that restrict guest visibility.
Configure column and board permissions to hide sensitive data.
Organisations working with sensitive client data must document these monday.com permission configurations for compliance audits. Feel free to reach out to Fruition to know more.
FAQs
Can you convert an existing Open workspace to a monday.com private workspace?
Yes, monday.com Enterprise accounts can change workspace privacy settings. All you have to do is navigate to the workspace homepage to access the workspace settings and modify the privacy option from 'Open to Closed.' Existing board members will retain their access (you can edit it), but future access requires approval or invitation.
How do item-level permissions interact with monday.com dashboard widgets?
Dashboard widgets respect the underlying item-level permissions. In a monday.com private workspace, a user viewing the dashboard will only see data from items they have permission to access. It's a great way to maintain data segregation, making it safe to create executive-level views without exposing confidential details.
What happens when a monday.com private workspace owner leaves?
When removing a workspace owner, their board permissions must be reassigned. Boards they own won't automatically transfer. Only board owners can bypass permissions, so organisations should establish ownership transfer procedures before the member departs. This will prevent access disruptions and permission gaps.
