The world’s largest and most successful organizations use Airtable to do just about everything, from producing Oscar-winning films to rolling out life-saving vaccines.
These mission-critical use cases are only made possible by administrators. Admins have a lot on their plates, from managing user access to guaranteeing security so teams can build custom applications without any issues. And as more teams across their organizations use Airtable, they need new and improved tools to manage users at scale.
Today, we’re announcing new functionality to help manage Airtable at scale, including:
- A streamlined new Admin Panel experience
- New ability to create and leverage User Groups
- New security controls and improved monitoring tools
- Improved performance and base management settings
Streamline tasks with a redesigned Admin Panel
First up is a change you’ll notice pretty quickly: a complete redesign of the Admin Panel. The Admin Panel is an Enterprise plan feature that lets administrators proactively manage their users, control access and security, and understand how teams are using Airtable.
Because we know efficiency is always top of mind for administrators, we simplified the panel’s visual design to streamline administrative tasks, saving you time and precious clicks to filter and search for users, provision/deprovision users, and more.
We also added new functionality so you can:
- Easily add collaborators to bases and workspaces
- Manage collaborator permissions at the base and workspace level
- Perform bulk actions, such as upgrading access or deactivating users
Manage teams with user groups
As organizations scale, individually managing users’ access and permissions can be arduous. That’s why Airtable is announcing the general availability of user groups for our Enterprise customers. User groups let you create groups of users, reducing the work needed to manage access to workspaces, bases, tables, and fields with teams.
With user groups, creators on Enterprise plans can easily:
- Invite groups and teams to a specific base or workspace with just a few clicks
- Manage permissions and access for groups, not just individuals
- Manage field permissions in bulk for groups of users
- Reduce the time it takes to onboard or offboard users as they change teams
- Connect user groups in Airtable with your identity provider to leverage a single source of truth for user permissions
Ensure security with audit logs & enhanced sharing restrictions
Security allows orgs to safely conduct business and do what they love. That’s why we released audit logs, which help admins monitor activity and identify potential risks. Customers on our Enterprise plan can retrieve audit logs programmatically through an API or manually via the Admin Panel. If you’re retrieving logs through the Audit Log API, you can also connect it with a third-party security information and event management (SIEM) tool, and proactively set up alerts.
⚡ Pro tip: For organizations on the Enterprise plan, we also offer an Enterprise API that allows admins to programmatically manage users, bases, and workspaces in addition to the Audit Log API.
We also released workspace sharing restrictions to give you more control over who has access to what data. This feature allows admins and workspace owners to restrict invitation and sharing capabilities on a workspace, to limit who can access more sensitive information.
Scale processes with improved base performance & management
As your list of stakeholders gets longer, your organization’s base performance shouldn’t falter a bit. As a first step, we've improved loading times for bases with 10,000+ records, which has resulted in much faster base load times for users in large bases.
Take it from Cody Stanaszek, a platform engineer at Hulu who reported experiencing 60% faster base loading times, letting the company “scale even more effectively as we continue building more advanced workflows on Airtable."
This experience has already been piloted with Airtable’s largest customers and will be rolling out to all Enterprise customers over the coming months.
To deliver more meaningful improvements over the upcoming months, we’ve created a new engineering team dedicated to performance. We’ll continue to make improvements to large Airtable bases, including:
- Faster loading times
- Smoother interactive performance
- Increased record limits
We’re also excited to announce several new changes to the overall view management experience, which make it easier to manage views at scale in large bases. These features, which will be rolling out in the coming weeks, include:
- The ability to reassign personal views
- New view super-sections and creation shortcuts
- A new view creation flow to capture critical information
- Defaulting to personal view creation in large bases
Airtable is committed to supporting you with our new Admin Panel and user groups, security controls and monitoring tools, and improved base management and performance features.
When your org grows, your workflows should, too. We’ll keep you informed as we continue to make updates and refreshes.
Interested in an Enterprise plan for your organization? Learn more here.