When working on complex molecular modeling projects, collaboration becomes not just helpful, but essential. Whether you’re co-authoring papers, sharing protein structures, or running simulations in the cloud, you need a simple and secure way to manage who sees, edits, or contributes to your work.
This is particularly challenging when teams are distributed, tasks are diverse, and datasets are sensitive. Knowing who has access to what, keeping everything centralized, and staying productive without micromanaging permissions—these are real headaches for many molecular modelers.
Fortunately, SAMSON Connect provides functionality that addresses these very issues. One particularly powerful feature is Group Management. In this post, we’ll walk you through how to create and manage scientific teams in SAMSON Connect using groups, and how this can simplify your collaborations.
Creating Groups
In SAMSON Connect, you can create an unlimited number of groups—either public or private. This gives you flexibility for organizing projects, teams, or even temporary collaborations.
To start, go to the Groups section of your user menu. Here, you’ll find all the groups you’ve created or joined. If you’re the owner of a group, you gain full control over memberships and permissions within that group.
Customizing Group Settings
Group owners can set:
- Visibility — make the group public so others can find and request to join, or keep it private and invite-only.
- Join settings — decide whether users can apply to join or only be added manually.
Managing Memberships
Group owners can manage membership details, including:
- Changing a member’s role (e.g., editor, viewer)
- Setting membership duration
Adding Members
To add someone, click Add a member. You can search by username, real name, or email. Inviting someone who doesn’t have a SAMSON account? You can still add them by email—they’ll receive an invitation to join.
Why Use Groups?
- Centralized control: Quickly manage who can access which documents, jobs or extensions.
- Scalability: Whether your team has 2 people or 20, group roles and visibility make it scalable.
- Security: Prevent unintended access while sharing only what’s needed with the right people.
This structure is especially useful for PIs coordinating lab work, collaborators sharing sensitive models, or educators distributing files to a classroom.
To learn more about collaborating in SAMSON, visit the full documentation page here: https://documentation.samson-connect.net/users/latest/collaboration/
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can get SAMSON at https://www.samson-connect.net.