---
title: Project Collaboration
description: Project folders, project owners, assistants, external members, sub-projects, expiring permissions, sync and lifecycle management.
slug: project-collaboration
lang: en
category: Product Features
category_order: 2
order: 13
keywords:
  - Projects
  - Project folders
  - Collaboration
  - External members
  - Sub-projects
---

# Project Collaboration

Projects place cross-department, cross-company or temporary collaborators and files into one workspace. Compared with department folders, projects focus on collaboration around one objective: project owners invite enterprise or external members, configure member permissions, and manage files, versions, sync, search, sharing and archiving through the project lifecycle.

![My projects](../../assets/images/my-projects.jpg)
*My Projects centralizes projects that a user created, owns, participates in or has been invited to join.*

## Project Roles

| Role | Typical Responsibility |
| --- | --- |
| Project owner | Manage project information, members, permissions, transfer and lifecycle |
| Project assistant | Assist the owner with members and files; may take part of management responsibility |
| Project member | Access, upload, edit, download, comment or sync files according to project permissions |
| External member | Join by invitation and access only the authorized project scope |

Project owners and assistants can assign precise permissions to any project file or folder and set validity periods, which is useful for suppliers, customers, temporary consultants and stage-based collaborators.

![Project management](../../assets/images/project-management.jpg)
*Project management maintains members, roles, permissions, expiration dates and project settings.*

## Project Folders

Project folders can be created in allowed locations such as personal files or department roots. They support upload, preview, online editing, client editing, versioning, search, sharing, sync and access logs, while adding project members, project permissions, transfer, archiving and templates.

## Sub-Projects

Large projects can be split into sub-projects. Sub-projects are useful for phases, disciplines, regions, customers, delivery batches or external partners, avoiding a single flat directory with too many files.

## Sync, Search And Versions

Project folders can be synced locally for long-term offline editing, engineering materials, design files and batch processing. Sync still follows download, upload, edit and expiration permissions. Project files also participate in full-text search, advanced search, tag search and version management, making files easier to locate and roll back.

## Department Projects And Personal Projects

Department projects are suitable for formal business projects and are usually created by departments or department administrators. Personal projects are suitable for small collaborations initiated by individuals. Projects and departments are not exclusive: a project can be created from department files and invite members from other departments or outside the enterprise.

## Relationship With Document Control Projects

A document control project is an industry module built on project collaboration. It adds recipients, transmittals, TRANSMITTAL numbering, sending records and document control workflows. For strict outbound delivery evidence, version tracking and recipient acknowledgement, see [Document Control Project](doc-control-project.md).