Once you’ve created a template, it acts as a ready-to-copy asset that you or anyone else you share your template with can use for creating new sessions.
This article will guide you through how to share your templates so your colleagues and peers can access and copy them.
There are the following ways to share a template:
Create a Visitor link for your private (Personal or Team) templates -> this allows anyone with the link to copy your template into a session
Invite Collaborators to your Template -> Collaborators will have the template available in their Personal (or Team) template collection
If you are a member of a Team workspace, and you create a team template, that will automatically be available to all other members of the team in the team’s template collection
Publish a template in the Public template collection of SessionLab
Sharing a template via a Visitor link
If you’ve created a template in SessionLab that you would like to share with your audience, the easiest option is to enable the Visitor link for your template and then share that link.
The Visitor link will allow anyone to view your template without them having to sign in to SessionLab; and if they sign in to SessionLab, they will be able to copy your template into their own session.
Please note that if you are using the SessionLab Team plan, all your team members have access to your team templates by default, so you don’t need to create Visitor links for all your templates.
In order to create a Visitor link for your template, you first need to enable the editing of your template, and then you can enable the Visitor link the same way as for regular sessions.
Please note that users on the Basic plan will be unable to duplicate a multi-day template as the Basic plan does not allow users to create multi-day sessions. However, users on a paid plan or in the trial period of a paid plan will be able to duplicate a multi-day session.
If the user duplicates a multi-day template to create a multi-day session while they’re in the trial period of a paid plan, then they will continue to have access to the multi-day session when their trial period expires.
Inviting collaborators to your template
If you wish to collaborate with colleagues on your template, you can add them as Collaborators to it. As with regular sessions, the template owner is able to invite any other SessionLab user to collaborate on a template.
Please bear in mind that your collaborators do not need to have a paid subscription. The only condition to invite collaborators to a template is that the owner (creator) of the template must have the rights to share sessions and templates (i.e. being on a Pro or Team subscription, or in the trial period of a paid subscription); the invited collaborators may even be using the free Basic version. As long as the template owner is on a Pro or Team subscription, the shared template will be accessible to all invited collaborators.
One important difference between sharing a template with a Visitor link versus inviting Collaborators is that when you invite a collaborator to a template, it will appear in their Personal template collection which can be accessed from the left-hand side panel on their home page. While if someone only has the Visitor link, the template will not appear on the homepage of their SessionLab account.
Sharing Team templates
If a template is created in a team workspace, then by default all members of that team will have viewer rights to the template and will be able to copy the template, but not make changes to it.
If you would like one of your team members to collaborate on the template with you, simply invite them by following the steps above. The only difference is that the template will be stored in your team template collection rather than appearing in your collaborator’s private template collection. This can also be accessed from the left-hand side panel on their home page.
If you wish to share your team template with anyone else outside your team, you still may enable the Visitor link for your template as described above.
Publish a template to the Public template collection
By default, every session and template you create in SessionLab is private by default and only gets shared with the people you decide to invite to it. Thus, all the three ways to share a template above assume your template has private visibility.
If you wish to submit your template into the Public template collection of SessionLab, we welcome your contribution. We’re striving to help people become better facilitators, and if you want to share your facilitation knowledge through a well-designed template, please follow the public template guideline here and we’re happy to help to get your template published.
If your template gets approved and published, then it will be visible on the public internet and available for all SessionLab users to copy and use for their own sessions.