Manage organizations & users
Categories:
Purpose: This document covers organizations, user roles and permissions, and user and organization management in Verily Workbench.
Introduction
Flexible and structured management of users is a core requirement for enterprise software platforms. Organizational administrators should have visibility into the status of their population of managed users. IT and security administrators should be able to set organization-wide defaults and policy requirements, and well-defined organizational roles should support self-service actions where possible to ensure scalability.
To support these needs, Verily Workbench maintains a top-level Organization concept, representing a set of users linked by their employer or primary institutional identity. Each user, workspace, and data collection belongs to exactly one organization, creating a clear boundary of ownership, management, and control.
Most Workbench customers will identify an organization admin from within their team to manage the organization and user lifecycle, enable self-service onboarding and offboarding of researchers, and direct control over policy and billing details. In some cases (and depending on the license agreement) a Workbench customer may delegate this responsibility to the Workbench Support team instead. For more information about admin and user roles, see Organization roles and permissions.
Most of the operations described below may be done via both the Workbench web UI, or the Workbench CLI. In a few cases, it is necessary to use the CLI.
Key concepts
Organization
An organization in Workbench represents the top level of tenancy within the enterprise platform. Every workspace, data collection, and user can trace back to a single owning organization, providing a logical unit of separation, administration, and ownership.
Conceptually, a Workbench organization is somewhat similar to a Google Cloud organization (where Google Cloud projects are all housed under a single Google Cloud organization) or to an Active Directory domain (where Active Directory users are housed under a single domain). Of course, there are differences in how exactly this concept is applied to the Workbench system.
Each organization contains the following:
- Metadata and configuration (e.g., name, description).
- Users and roles.
- Resources (e.g., workspaces and data collections).
- A group containing all members of the organization. Can be used for sharing resources with the whole organization.
User lifecycle
The lifecycle of a Workbench user involves the following states:
- Invited: The user has been invited to join Workbench and (if required by license) acknowledge the terms of service.
- Active: The user is in good standing and may access Workbench features subject to their parent organization’s configuration.
- Disabled: The user has been disabled by an organization or Workbench administrator. The user may be re-enabled with all prior permissions kept intact.
- Archived: The user has been permanently removed from all access to Workbench. All permissions and group memberships have been removed.
Every Workbench user must be a member of exactly one organization. It is typically an organization admin who invites new users to the system (see Invite a new user to your organization). Administrators may also transition a user to a temporary Disabled state (if they expect to regain access in the near future), or a more permanent Archived state (if they are no longer an employee or have left the sponsoring organization).
Managing organizations
Organization roles and permissions
The set of roles and permissions at the organization level is as follows:
| Role | Description | Permissions |
| Workbench support | A Workbench-wide role. Generally assumed by the Workbench Support and Operations teams. |
|
| Organization admin | An individual with delegated responsibility to manage organization-level configuration and user lifecycles. |
|
| Organization user | An end user of Workbench who is a member of an organization. |
|
| Pod Manager | A pod manager can create pods in addition to everything an organization user can do. When a pod is created, this user is granted Pod Admin on the pod. |
|
Request a new organization
New organizations are created by the Workbench support role. Generally a new organization will be created as part of the onboarding process of a new Workbench customer.
In some scenarios, it may make sense to create a new organization to represent a new group of users who will access Workbench under an existing license agreement (i.e., collaborators from a new institution or customer organization). In this case, please contact Workbench Support to request a new organization. Include at least the following information:
Name: Example Organization
Short name: example-org
Administrator emails: admin.1@example.com, admin.2@example.com
Verify details of the new organization
In the Workbench web UI, you can view the organizations to which you have access.
The Organizations page includes the organization that you belong to (also listed in Your profile), as well as any other organizations for which you have administrative permissions.
You should be able to select the new organization from the pulldown menu, and verify that you are an Admin for that org.
To verify the details of the new organization (and to confirm that you’ve been granted
administrative permissions), use the wb org describe and wb org user list commands from the
command-line interface (CLI):
$ wb org describe --org=example-org
ID: example-org
Name: Example Organization
ToS Required: true
Description: (unset)
$ wb org user list --org=example-org
EMAIL STATE TOS STATUS ROLES
admin.1@example.com ENABLED TOS_OK ADMIN
Grant the organization admin role
The individual(s) entrusted to administer a given organization may change over time. An admin can
grant admin privileges to another org member with the wb org role grant CLI command or via the Workbench web UI.
In the Permissions tab for an organization for which you have admin access, you can manage the roles for other users, or allow them to create pods.
To grant the admin role to a user who's not part of the organization, use the Assign roles button.
$ wb org role grant --org=example-org --email=admin.2@example.com --role=ADMIN
Granted ADMIN role to admin.2@example.com in example-org.
Note
It's possible for a Workbench user who is a member of one organization to be an administrator of one or more other organizations by having the "organization admin" role granted to them on multiple organizations. This setup may make sense in a setting where one Workbench customer is coordinating a research collaboration between researchers from multiple home institutions. Each institution would have a distinct organization, but an administrator from the customer organization might be granted "organization admin" access across all collaborating institutions, for the sake of efficiency.Set organization-level defaults
Organization administrators may update metadata related to the organization and set defaults which
will apply to certain aspects of Workbench usage by members of the organization. This may be
done via the Edit button at the top right of the Organizations page, or by using the wb org update CLI command:
wb org update --org=example-org --new-description="Researchers working under Example Corp to access the Foo Bar dataset in Workbench"
Managing users
Note
Some user management functionality requires use of the Workbench CLI. This provides a base level of support for administrative and automation-driven usage.Invite a new user to your organization
An organization admin is responsible for inviting new users to Workbench. You can do this via the CLI, or the Workbench web UI.
To invite a new user to an organization, click on the Add users button from the organization's page.
An organization admin can invite a user with the wb org user invite command:
wb org user invite --org=example-org --email=user.1@example.com
After a user has been invited, the rest of the flow is typically as follows:
-
(Optional, but necessary to allow the user to create new workspaces): the organization admin grants the user access to billing resources within the organization. This is done by adding the user to a pod. See Set up billing with pods for more detail.
-
The organization admin notifies the user that they’ve been invited and to visit https://workbench.verily.com/ to acknowledge the terms of service and gain access to Workbench.
-
The invited user logs in, acknowledges the terms of service, and continues to Workbench.
Acknowledge the terms of service
Depending on licensing terms, when a new user first logs in to Workbench, they may be asked to first acknowledge the standard terms of service:
After clicking Accept and continue, the user is redirected to the Workbench homepage and may access workspaces and data collections shared with them.
View users in your organization
An organization admin may get an overview of all users within the organization via the Members
tab of the Organizations page in the UI, or with the wb org user list command:
$ wb org user list --org=example-org
EMAIL STATE TOS STATUS ROLES
admin.1@example.com ACTIVE TOS_OK ADMIN
user.1@example.com ARCHIVED TOS_OK USER
Note
In some cases, a user who belongs to one organization may have been granted the
"organization admin" role on another organization. In this case, the admin user will show up in the wb org user list output for the second organization.
In the UI, you will see these users listed in the Permissions tab with an "External" chip next to their name.
Disable or archive a user
If a user should no longer have access to Verily Workbench, an organization admin may temporarily disable or permanently remove a user’s access.
Disabling ("Deactivating") a user in Workbench will cause their login access to Workbench to be revoked, without permanently removing that user’s presence in workspace and organization ACLs and permission sets. This allows the operation to be completed quickly and to be easily reversible, e.g., if an employee is on temporary leave.
In the Members list for an organization, click on the 'three-dot' menu for a user, and select Deactivate.
Disable a user with the wb org user disable command:
$ wb org user disable --email=user.1@example.com --org=example-org
User user.1@example.com disabled in the organization example-org.
Re-enabling a user
Once disabled, a user can be re-enabled via the Workbench UI by re-inviting them, and via the CLI using the wb org user enable command.
Archiving a disabled user
A user may also be more permanently removed from Workbench via the CLI, with the wb org user archive
command.
Be aware
Currently, once a user with a given email address has been archived, they may not be re-invited to Workbench. This restriction is expected to be relaxed in a future release.$ wb org user archive --org=example-org --email=user.1@example.com
Email: user.1@example.com
State: DISABLED
ToS Status: TOS_OK
Org Roles: USER
Archiving users cannot be undone. Are you sure you want to archive this user? (y/N) y
User user.1@example.com has been archived in the organization example-org.
Last Modified: 13 January 2025