Teams and Workspaces: Organize and Share SOPs at Scale

30-Second Summary

As your SOP library grows, one flat list of procedures stops working. Different departments need different SOPs. Some procedures are internal-only. Others need to be shared with contractors via a public link. Until now, organizing and controlling access in SOPX meant managing everything at the account level. Not anymore. With teams and workspaces, you can group users, organize SOPs by department or project, and control exactly who sees what, with role-based permissions and public link sharing for anyone outside your organization.

The problem: SOPs grow, structure doesn’t

Most teams start with a handful of procedures. At that stage, a simple list works fine. Everyone sees everything, and that’s okay because “everything” is ten SOPs.

Then the library grows. Production has their SOPs. Quality has theirs. Maintenance documents their own procedures. The warehouse team has a separate set. IT has onboarding workflows. And suddenly, everyone is scrolling through procedures that have nothing to do with their job.

Without structure, three things happen:

1. People can’t find what they need. A production operator searching through 150 SOPs to find the one relevant to their machine wastes time and loses patience.
2. Sensitive procedures are visible to everyone. Not every SOP should be accessible to every employee. Compliance procedures, HR workflows, or client-specific processes may need restricted access.
3. Sharing becomes all-or-nothing. Either someone has access to everything, or they have access to nothing. There’s no middle ground.

This is not a problem with documentation. It is a problem with organization.

What we built

SOPX now supports three layers of organization and access control: teams, workspaces, and granular SOP sharing.

Teams

Teams are groups of users within your SOPX organization. You create a team, add members, and then assign that team access to specific workspaces or individual SOPs.

Think of teams as reflecting how your company is already organized: production, quality, maintenance, HR, onboarding. Instead of managing access person by person, you manage it by group.

Example: You create a “Production Floor” team with 12 operators and a shift lead. When you create a new workspace for machine changeover procedures, you grant the team access once. All 13 people can see every SOP inside. When a new operator joins, you add them to the team and they immediately inherit access to everything the team can see.

Workspaces

Workspaces are containers for organizing SOPs. Every workspace has a visibility setting: open or private.

• Open workspaces: Everyone in the organization can view the SOPs inside. Use this for company-wide procedures like safety, general onboarding, or policies that apply to all employees.
• Private workspaces: Only invited members and teams can access the SOPs inside. Use this for department-specific procedures, client-specific work, or anything that shouldn’t be visible to the entire organization.

For each workspace, you can also enable public link sharing. When enabled, individual SOPs within the workspace can be shared via a public link or QR code. Anyone with the link can view that specific SOP without logging in or creating an account. Public links work at the individual SOP level, not the workspace level, so you control exactly which procedures are accessible externally.

Example: A food production company creates separate workspaces for “HACCP Procedures” (private, quality team only), “Machine Maintenance” (private, maintenance team), and “General Safety” (open, everyone). The maintenance team only sees their workspace and the open safety workspace. The quality manager sees HACCP. For contractor onboarding, they enable public links on the relevant workspace and share individual SOP links with contractors before they arrive on site, no account needed.

Permissions and roles

Both workspaces and individual SOPs use the same permission levels:

• Viewer: View procedures and content
• Editor: View, create, and edit procedures
• Manager: Full control including sharing and access management

Organization admins and owners always have full manager access across all workspaces.

Sharing individual SOPs

Every SOP belongs to a workspace, but you can also share individual SOPs with specific teams or members outside that workspace. This is useful when someone needs access to a specific procedure without needing access to the entire workspace.

Members who receive individual access to an SOP (without workspace access) will see it in their “Shared with me” tab. No need to add them to a workspace just for one procedure.

How permissions resolve when access overlaps:

• The SOP owner always has full access. If you created the SOP, you can always view, edit, and manage it, regardless of workspace or sharing settings.
• Direct SOP-level access overrides workspace-level access. If Maria is a viewer in the “Production” workspace but you share a specific SOP with her as an editor, she can edit that SOP even though she can only view others in the workspace.
• When a member has both team and individual access, the highest permission wins. If Tom is a viewer through the “Maintenance” team but you also share the SOP with him individually as an editor, he gets editor access.
• Workspace managers automatically get full access to all SOPs inside. If Lisa is a manager of the “Quality” workspace, she can view, edit, and manage every SOP in that workspace, even ones she didn’t create.

SOPs start private

When you create a new SOP, it is private by default and not shared with anyone. This means you can draft, edit, and refine content before anyone else sees it. When the SOP is ready, you share it with the relevant workspace, team, or individuals.

How this works in practice

Here are the patterns we see teams adopting:

By department

Create a workspace per department: Production, Quality, Maintenance, Logistics, HR. Set each to private and grant the corresponding team access. Cross-functional procedures (like safety) go into an open workspace visible to everyone in the organization.

By location or site

Multi-site operations create private workspaces per facility. SOPs that are site-specific stay in the site workspace. SOPs that apply everywhere go into an open workspace.

By external audience

Enable public links on a workspace containing contractor onboarding procedures. Share individual SOP links with every new contractor before they arrive on site. They open it on their phone, review the procedure, and show up prepared. No account, no app, no friction.

By client or project

Service companies or consultancies create private workspaces per client. Document the procedures for each engagement separately. Share individual SOPs externally via public link when the client needs to see them.

Why this matters as you scale

When your team is five people with 20 SOPs, organization doesn’t matter much. When your team is 50 people across three departments with 200 SOPs, it matters a lot.

Without structure:

• New employees don’t know which SOPs are relevant to them
• Supervisors can’t quickly find the procedures their team needs
• Sensitive procedures are visible to people who shouldn’t see them
• Sharing with external people means sharing everything or nothing

With teams and workspaces:

• Every user sees exactly the SOPs relevant to their role
• New team members inherit the right access automatically
• Open workspaces handle company-wide procedures, private workspaces lock down the rest
• Public links let you share specific SOPs externally without exposing your entire library
• SOPs start private, so you can draft in peace before sharing
• You can reorganize as your company grows without starting over

Getting started

If you already have SOPs in SOPX, you can start organizing them into workspaces today:

1. Create workspaces for your main organizational units (departments, sites, or projects) and set visibility to open or private
2. Create teams that match your company structure
3. Move existing SOPs into the relevant workspaces
4. Assign team access to each workspace with the right permission level (viewer, editor, or manager)
5. Enable public links on workspaces where external sharing is needed and share individual SOP links with contractors, partners, or auditors

This takes minutes to set up, and the payoff is immediate: less clutter, clearer access, and easier sharing.

Teams and workspaces are available now on all SOPX plans. Sign up or log in to get started.