### Inviting members

You turn a private folder into a shared workspace by inviting other users as ‘members’ – you yourself are the first member and owner of the workspace.

• Select File Access Invite Member in the top menu bar to trigger this action.

For action details see 4.4.1 Creating shared workspaces. By inviting additional members to a shared workspace, you enlarge the group of people who may access the workspace and the objects it contains. Before you turn a private folder into a shared workspace, please read 4.4 Creating and managing shared workspaces and 4.5 Workspace membership; section 4.6 Access rights and roles explains how to modify the access rights of the members in a shared workspace.

A private folder, a shared workspace or a folder or discussion forum within a workspace become a public workspace by selecting File Access Public Access (by default only allowed for managers). This feature may have been disabled altogether by your BSCW administrator for security reasons.

You may specify which actions are possible for anonymous access in a public workspace. This gives you extended access control. As a default, every user is authorized to read all documents in a public folder. All published objects are listed in the public space of the BSCW server. This public space, which is a community folder named ‘public’, may be accessed by selecting GoTo Public Space in the top menu or by clicking the community icon in the instant access bar .

The actions described above are also offered in the action menus of folder or discussion forum entries ( Access Invite Member and Access Public Access ).

If you plan to invite a large number of users to a workspace, consider adding a community to the workspace. Communities can accommodate large numbers of members and offer access to the community workspace without loss of performance.