Inviting an external user into your Cost Workspace

Adding external consultants to allow them to carry out work on your behalf.

You can give external consultants access to your cost workspace so they can work on your behalf. For example, they might be an external project manager, or a financial consulting firm handling all your cost and contract tasks.

External consultants do not need a user account in your organization and can use their own Aconex account to access your cost data.

Tip!

The external consultants you give access to using these steps can only access the Cost data you grant them access to. They can never access data in other modules such as Mail or Documents.

Adding an external User

Adding an external user is similar to adding an internal user to Cost. See here for more information on managing users and security.

In the Cost drop down menu, select Cost Administration to open the Cost Users screen.
Select the Other Organizations tab.
Click Add on the toolbar to open the Enable User window.
Select the Organization of the user you want to enable.
Select the User, Profile, and OBS Assignment.

Tip!

You can control security of external users just like users in your own organization.

What if I can’t find the user or organization on the list?

It’s possible that you might not be able to find a user or their organization when trying to enable them as a guest user, as shown here.

What’s happening here?

The external user must be invited to the project before you can add them in Cost, or you can change to another project that the user you want to invite is already a participant of.

Tip!

Look in the Project Directory to see which users are participants of the current project.

Restricting access to a project’s cost data

What happens if you want to invite an external user to help configure and set up Cost, but you don’t want them to access all projects? There are few options available.

Set them up using a common test or sample project – use this approach if there isn’t any real data to be concerned about.
Give the user a restricted security profile – create a security profile that restricts project data access as appropriate. This will affect that user’s access to all projects.
Disable cost-access for a given project – once the external user is invited, you can turn off access to any projects by disabling them in the Project tab below the external user row.

The following example show a user with access to the AiresFab Upgrade and Wahgunyah projects.