In collaborative scientific environments — from academic labs to cross-institutional research teams — sharing models, simulations, and analysis workflows is critical. If you’re a molecular modeler using SAMSON, you might have faced challenges when organizing joint work: How do you ensure that only the right people can view or edit your models? How do you version-control and manage access to projects involving external collaborators? This is where groups on SAMSON Connect become incredibly useful.
This blog post introduces the key features of group management in SAMSON Connect, which lets you easily structure collaborations, control access rights, and streamline the sharing of documents and jobs — all without needing external tools or complicated email chains.
Create groups the way your project needs
Whether you’re working on a drug discovery pipeline or a collaborative protein folding study, you can create an unlimited number of groups in SAMSON Connect. These can be either public (visible to anyone) or private (visible only to members). Public groups can help other researchers discover your work, while private ones give you full control over access.
Granular roles and responsibilities
When you create a group, you automatically become the group owner, giving you several administrative capabilities. You can:
- Edit group information and visibility settings
- Control how users join the group (open, by request, or by invitation)
- Assign roles and set membership end dates
This kind of fine-grained control is particularly useful for running rotating student projects or collaborations with specific timelines.
Flexible invitation system
You can add new members by searching for their SAMSON username, full name, or email address. Even better, if someone you’re collaborating with doesn’t yet have a SAMSON account, you can still invite them by just entering their email address. SAMSON Connect handles the rest.
Sharing within groups
Groups aren’t just containers — they’re functional environments. You can share documents, jobs, or even extensions with your group. For example, if you’ve just run a cloud-based simulation using AlphaFold or GROMACS, you can make the results available only to a specific group. This is a secure way to work on sensitive or unpublished research projects while still enabling streamlined data sharing.
Since visibility settings are consistent across assets (documents and jobs), working in groups makes it easier to manage permissions in a single place, especially for larger collaborations. Each group acts as its own permissions capsule.
Set up once, use continuously
Once your groups are up and running, they serve as a persistent workspace for the team. You can update roles, documents, or memberships at any time, giving you flexibility as your project evolves.
Explore these features and streamline your team’s research workflow. Group management is a quiet but powerful tool within SAMSON that helps you focus more on the science and less on administration.
For more details and step-by-step instructions, visit the full documentation page at https://documentation.samson-connect.net/users/latest/collaboration/.
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. To get SAMSON, visit https://www.samson-connect.net.