Using Organizations

Organizations member types

Organizations represent individual Enterprise accounts and are associated with email domains (e.g., acme.com). So whether you're rolling out Airtable to an entire company or just a department or team, Organizations are linked to single Enterprise accounts.

• Organization member: A user account owned by an Organization. The user’s email address must match the Organization’s set of email domains; otherwise, the user cannot join as an Organization member. A user account can only be a member of one Organization.

• Unmanaged user: A user account matches the Organization’s set of email domains but is not owned by the Organization. The most common example of unmanaged users is customers with multiple Organizations (multiple enterprise accounts). 

• External user: A user account that does not match the Organization’s set of email domains (e.g., example.com instead of acme.com). Learn more about managing external users below.

Managing organization memberships

Understanding how users and members are managed is an essential part of getting the most out of organizations and what you can do with Airtable. Airtable provides admins with three ways to allow a user to become an Organization member:

• Domain capture: All Airtable users with emails that match their Organization's email domains become Organization members. As an example, when a new user from Acme company creates an Airtable account with their @acme.com email address, they are automatically added as an Organization member in Acme's Airtable instance.

• Member-by-invite: Unlike domain capture, even though a user's email domain may match an organization's domain(s), they will not automatically be added as an Organization member, instead that user would be an unmanaged user. After accepting an invitation to an Organization-owned workspace/base or being added to a user group, users with emails that match their Organization's email domains are then upgraded to Organization members.

• Manual: By default, all users are unmanaged or external users. Admins must explicitly upgrade users to members. 

Admins can only take the following actions on a user account if that user is an Organization member:

• Requiring users to log in via SSO

• Changing user email addresses

• Deactivating user accounts

• Granting the admin role to users

• Signing users out of all sessions

To upgrade a collaborator from an unmanaged user to an Organization member:

1. Visit your admin panel and select Users from the side menu

2. From Users, find the name of the user you want to start managing. 

3. Click the … to the right of their name and select Start managing.

4. Confirm by clicking Manage account.

Organizations' dependencies

• Organization member: A user can only be a member of a single Organization. Keep in mind that this does not prevent users from being shared on content across Organizations. 

• Unmanaged users: Customers with unmanaged users often have overlapping collaborators across workspaces, but a user can only be a member of a single Organization. This helps to prevent being billed multiple times for the same user in federated organizations.

• Member-by-invite: Any user account matching the set of the Organization’s email domains and the user account cannot already be a member of another Organization.

  • If multiple Organizations with member-by-invite share email domains, membership will be determined on a first-come-first-serve basis depending on which workspaces/bases a user accepts an invitation to first.

• Domain capture: When future users sign up for Airtable with a matching email address, they immediately become Organization members. This is only recommended for wall-to-wall deployments of Airtable.

  • Admins cannot stop managing Organization members when domain capture is enabled.   

• Admins upgrading non-enterprise workspaces: Workspace owners will receive an email notification stating the workspace is upgraded to an Enterprise account.

  • Organization members can upgrade non-enterprise workspaces to Enterprise, if they are a workspace owner.

FAQs