When it comes to getting work done, we all know how valuable it is to get input from multiple parties along the way. With this in mind, we’ve made some major improvements to the Elance Workroom that will allow you to invite whomever you want, whenever you want to collaborate with you in your workroom.

Here are a few really exciting new features that we’re very pleased to release:

Workroom Team Collaboration

Employers on Elance have long been asking for the ability to set up “company” accounts with the ability to add multiple team members and assign them role-based permissions. Effective immediately, employers can now add as many people as they want to their account and assign them roles such as Account Administrator, Manager, and Staff.

For example, imagine that you decide that you want to hire someone on Elance, want to participate in the hiring and payment process, but want to delegate the management of the work-in-process to someone else on your team. Quite easily done.

This means that you no longer have to share your log-in credentials with colleagues who are helping you manage your Elance jobs. Further, you can control the access of each team-member with permissions – for example, you may not want some people to be able to see or touch any of the payment activities.

With teams (a free feature), employers will have the best of all worlds – visibility into all work in process, while being able to delegate tasks and activities to colleagues as needed.

Invite A Guest To Your Workroom

We are also introducing a new workroom "guest" role to invite a client or colleague to a specific workroom with limited permissions and temporary access, for example to get feedback on a particular design or object.

Say you are a client working with a designer who has uploaded some mockups in your workroom. You want to show them to a colleague or partner and get their feedback. You can now invite them as a “guest” (whether they are registered on Elance or not), and they can join the workroom, view files, and leave their own comments for all parties to see. Guest user access automatically expires after the time period you set. You’re in control.

Provider “Teams” Are Now Free

Earlier this year, we launched the teams feature for providers who asked us for the ability to have multiple parties from their company access the Workroom and contribute and collaborate together. We added this premium feature, and charged an additional $10 per month for its use. Starting today, we are waiving any additional fees for this feature, as the benefits for all are so great that we decided it should be available to our premium business memberships at no additional cost. So, if you have Small Business or Large Business provider account, give this feature a try and let us know how it goes.

Thank you to all who have provided their input on these new features. We hope you enjoy them. Personally, we at Elance are incredibly enthusiastic for these features for our own use for when we hire elancers!