When working on molecular design projects, sharing results and configurations across a team can be both essential and challenging. Whether you’re collaborating with researchers in your lab, students, or external contributors, it’s important to provide access to the right documents without compromising your intellectual property, privacy, or research workflow.
This is where SAMSON Connect provides useful tools for managing and sharing documents in a secure and customizable way from within the SAMSON platform. If you’re using cloud-based jobs or frequently sharing models and results, knowing how to manage document visibility can simplify your work and reduce organizational friction.
Publishing your document
In the SAMSON application, you can publish a document by navigating to Home > Publish. This opens a dialog window where you specify the document name, provide a description, and—importantly—choose the visibility of the document:
- Public: Anyone can access the document. Editing it, however, still requires the right permissions.
- Hidden: The document is accessible only by people who have a specific link to it. Editing restrictions still apply.
- Restricted: Only users who have been explicitly granted access can view or edit the document.
Once published, the document appears in your account on SAMSON Connect, and can also be managed from there.
Managing visibility and access
On SAMSON Connect, click your User menu > Documents to access a list of the documents you’ve shared or have access to.
As a document owner or editor, you can change the settings of a document at any time. This includes updating its visibility, renaming it, or modifying its description.
Access rights are handled separately and allow you to choose exactly who (users or groups) can view or modify the document.
You can grant access to:
- Individual users by username, full name, or email address
- Entire groups that you belong to or manage
This level of control makes it easy to share delicate or preliminary work with select collaborators without exposing it publicly.
Groups, which you can form and customize freely, make it easier to manage permissions at scale—for example when working on a shared project or supervising students. Each group can have its own roles and membership expiration dates.
Conclusion
Carefully managing document visibility and access rights helps you work more effectively with others while keeping control of sensitive data. Whether you’re maintaining a private document archive, publishing resources for your community, or working within a research consortium, SAMSON Connect gives you the flexibility to set up a workflow that works for you.
To learn more about collaboration features in SAMSON, visit the official documentation.
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can get SAMSON here.