Board Visitors in Office 365 Environments
When KanBo is installed within your Office 365 environment then the KanBo Board’s access is controlled by a Microsoft 365 Group. Microsoft uses the same mechanism to manage access to a Microsoft Team in Teams or a Yammer Group or a Plan in Planner.
Somehow Microsoft does not support any permission level of type Read-Only in that concept. The Microsoft 365 Group has Owners and Members (here the external users aka Guests are also included). As Microsoft 365 Group Owners are mapped to Board Owners and Microsoft 365 Group Members are mapped to Board Members in KanBo there is one Permission Level missing – yes, the Visitors.
We have implemented the Visitors Permission Level in KanBo so you can add any user to that level in Board. You can add internal tenant users as well as external users to the Visitor Permission Level in KanBo.
Visitors do not belong to the Microsoft 365 Group that is controlling the KanBo Board because the KanBo Visitors concept only applies to the “KanBo world”. This means that KanBo Visitor users can access the KanBo Board, they can read all content in cards except the documents. As Documents are stored in a SharePoint document library that is controlled by the Microsoft 365 Group where the concept of KanBo Visitors just does not exist. Consequently, Visitors in a KanBo Board do not have access to the Team in Microsoft Teams that is controlled by the same Microsoft 365 Group that controls the KanBo Board.
In scenarios where Microsoft 365 Group controls more than one KanBo Board adding a user to Members or Owners will also add the user to all other KanBo Boards with the same permission (Member or Owner). The KanBo Visitors concept is unique to KanBo and works only for one Board at a time. Consequently, adding a user to KanBo Visitors on one particular KanBo Board will not add the user to other KanBo Boards even if they are being controlled by the same Microsoft 365 Group.
Under the hood, in case you are changing the permission of users from Owners/Members to KanBo Visitors then you are removing users from the controlling Microsoft 365 Group, which removes access for them to the corresponding Team and its resources in Microsoft Teams.
In case of changing the permission of a user from KanBo Visitor to Owner/Member, you are adding them to the controlling Microsoft 365 Group that grants them permissions to all information in channels and all documents held by that Team in Microsoft Teams controlled by the same Microsoft 365 Group.
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