Collaborators in BackOps
Collaborators are the companies and teams working your event, such as vendors, venues, departments and clients. Learn how they organize work, people and access.
A collaborator is a company or team working your event: the venue, the staging vendor, the caterer, an internal department, the client, an artist's team. No event is produced by one group, and collaborators are how BackOps represents everyone involved and divides the work between them.
Why Collaborators Matter
On most shows, the list of who is involved lives in a spreadsheet, the work each group owes lives in email threads, and the documents each group needs are sent by hand. When something changes, there is no single place to see what the lighting vendor still has to deliver or who to call at the hotel.
Collaborators put each group's work, people and information in one place on the event. Advances, tasks, files, schedule activities and areas can all be assigned to a collaborator, and a collaborator's own people can log in and see exactly the part of the event that is theirs, without seeing everything else.
How Collaborators Work
A collaborator is always a group. Even an artist or a speaker is modeled as a collaborator, because there is almost always a team around them. The individual people inside a collaborator are its crew.
Collaborators are not fixed roles. There is no built-in Vendor or Venue category. Your organization defines collaborator types such as Venue, Vendor or Client, each with its own fields, and a collaborator can hold more than one type, because a vendor can also be a sponsor.
Your organization is a collaborator too. Every event has a default collaborator that represents your organization. It is created with the event, from the Default collaborator name entered when the event is set up.
Access is scoped by collaborator. People get permissions on a specific collaborator, so a vendor's production manager can manage their own crew and answer their own advances without seeing other vendors. See collaborator access.
Known companies come from the org library. Your organization's Collaborator Database keeps the venues and vendors you work with. Pull one onto an event with its details and people, and push what you learn back afterwards.
flowchart TD
L["Collaborator Database (org library)"] -->|"Pull"| C["Collaborator on the event"]
C -->|"Push"| L
C --> P["Crew"]
C --> W["Advances, tasks, files, schedule, areas"]
C --> A["Collaborator permissions"]Each Collaborator's Page
Open Collaborators in the event sidebar to reach a collaborator. Its page has tabs for Dashboard, Schedule, Tasks, Crew, Files, Dynamic Docs and Advance, and you can download a day sheet PDF that gathers its schedule, locations, points of contact and advances in one document.