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Shareable Venues and Devices — Types, Permissions, and Public Sharing

With the release of version 6.0 of the Kontakt.io Proximity REST API, we’ve introduced the concept of shareable venues and devices. In this article, we’ll explore what that means for your deployments and how to use this feature to create and manage your own network of shared venues and devices.

You can share venues, complete with all associated devices and actions, with other users. You can also share individual devices and allow users to add them to their own venues.
You can only share with managers outside of your company. The manager must be ‘known’ in the Kontakt.io Cloud, and you’ll need to know their account email in order to share your devices and venues with them.
Only the owner/manager of the venue or device can initiate the share.
Any shares will be visible to your supervisor managers.

Public sharing

You can share your venues publicly by sharing them with the ‘public manager’ public-infrastructure@kontakt.io. Any user with the Kontakt.io Public API key can access these public venues.

Sharing

Permissions

You can share in one of two ways:

VIEWER – (Venues and devices) The managers you share with have read-only access to the shared venues or devices and their actions.
EDITOR – (Devices only) If a device is shared as ‘EDITOR’, then a copy of the device is created. Actions from the original device will not be added to the copy. The new copy will not belong to any venue (even if the original did). You can modify this device and actions and your modifications will not be visible to the device owner or other shares. You can also add the device to your own venue.

Notifications

Once you share a venue/device with a manager or managers, they will receive an email containing information for the shared device.

Expiry

When you share a venue or device, by default it will be shared forever or until you delete or unshare it. You have the option to specify an expiry date when you create the share. The device or venue will be ‘unshared’ when the date is reached.

Shareable Venues and Devices

When you list venues and devices, the ShareType will be displayed. This can have one of the following values:
The first two values tell you about your company’s devices and not about sharing.

OWNER — This venue/device belongs to you
SUPERVISOR — This venue/device belongs to a subordinate manager of yours

If a device/venue is shared with you:

VIEWER — You have READ access to this shared venue/device
EDITOR — You have read/write access to this shared device

Unsharing

The owner of a shared device can withdraw the share at any time. If you withdraw a device that was shared as EDITOR then all changes to this device will be lost.