Feature request - Symbolic links

Ephasme
Ephasme
Community Member

Hi everyone at AgileBits,

1Password is awesome and I've been using it for a few years now. I'm not disappointed but still I think the way you're handling vaults is a bit weird IMO. Basically what you have now with vaults is items in folder with no way to put the same item in several vaults at the same time.

This is a bit annoying and I know it can be worked around with either copying the same item in several vaults (which has the downside of not replicating modifications on that item on all the vaults) or simply putting this item in a common vault (for sharing purpose).

The problem is:
Say I have A B and C in my family or team and I'm E.
I have items x y and z in my personal vault.
I want to share x with A and C, y with A and z with C.
I need to have a vault 1 containing x which is shared with A and C, a vault 2 containing y which is shared with A and a vault 3 containing z which is shared with C.

From the point of view of A, there are 3 vaults (which have all to be named differently, maybe something like A&E, A&C&E and A).
First, the names are not meaningful. They only represent relations between people. At the extreme this can end up with a unordered cartesian product of all the family/teams members.

Why not introducing some kind of symbolic linking between items. For example, I can symlink some of my items into someone else's vault? This allows both of us to share passwords without the hassle of vault's creation. Plus it seems more natural to have my password in my vault and some symlinks on them in other vaults.

For short, n=>n "link" relations through tags for example are much more powerful and useful than 1=>n "folder" relations.


1Password Version: Not Provided
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: Not Provided
Sync Type: Not Provided

Comments

  • Hi @Ephasme,

    Thanks for writing in. We would actually love to provide this feature. It's one that we've put a fair amount of thought towards and so far we haven't been able to crack it. This is challenging on multiple fronts... but the problems tend to stem from the fact that access to vaults changes over time. Which means that a linked item like this could become unlinked. There are technical solutions to this, but there's a lot of information to unpack and present to the user to make sure that the whole process is clear to them. Then there's the security side of how to handle this. Roustem's had some pretty cool ideas about how to tackle it, but we're still working through details.

    We're in complete agreement that n->n relationships are better than 1->n, which is why we decided to only offer Tags in 1Password.com as opposed to both Tags and Folders. So far we're quite happy with how that's turned out.

    Rick

  • brookwarner
    brookwarner
    Community Member

    Hey Rickfillion - appreciate your comprehensive response. I was wondering if it would be possible to write up a support article (or something) around 'the best way to set up your organisation sharing scheme' that takes into account the current features of 1password and known limitations (such as this one).

    Also, any updates on this?

  • "Best" is fairly subjective when it comes to how organizations want to share their data internally. What is acceptable and perhaps "best" to one organization may be completely out of the question for another. Also I suspect that such an article written with 1Password Families as the audience would be a fair bit different than such an article with 1Password Teams customers as the audience.

    Could you please elaborate a bit on what you'd like to see in such an article?

    Also, any updates on this?

    Only to say this is still something we'd like to accomplish.

    Ben

This discussion has been closed.