Skip to main content

Collaboration and sharing

DIAL is a collaboration platform: users create resources such as applications, prompts, conversations, and toolsets, then make them available to colleagues or the whole organization under controlled access. This page explains the model behind collaboration in DIAL — private and public spaces, sharing, and publication — and how those mechanisms relate. It is written for developers and evaluators who want to understand the model, not yet to configure it.

Collaboration rests on access control​

Everything DIAL Core manages is a resource — an application, conversation, prompt, file, or toolset. Each resource starts in its owner's private space, visible only to them. Collaboration is the controlled relaxation of that boundary: granting other users access to a resource without losing ownership of it.

Two distinct mechanisms relax the boundary, and the difference between them matters:

  • Sharing grants access to specific users, one resource at a time, with no approval needed.
  • Publication moves a resource into the public space for a broad audience, and always requires administrator approval.

Both build on DIAL's access control, so a collaborator only ever sees what the owner and the organization's roles permit.

Sharing: targeted, owner-controlled access​

Sharing lets a resource owner create a link and give it to chosen recipients. The resource stays in the owner's private space; the recipient gains access to that specific resource. The owner keeps control and can revoke access at any time.

Sharing is the right tool for working closely with a few people. You might share a conversation with a colleague to get feedback, or share an application with a teammate to test it. A sharing link can optionally grant edit and re-share permissions, which turns it into a real-time collaboration tool — for example, two developers iterating on the same Code App. To keep collaborators in sync, DIAL Core can notify subscribers when a shared resource changes.

Once shared, a resource becomes available to the recipient in DIAL Chat, in the Catalog, and through the API.

Publication: organization-wide availability​

Publication is how a resource graduates from a private project to a shared organizational asset. A published resource is placed in the public space, where it is available to all authenticated users by default; access rules on subfolders can restrict it to specific roles or groups. Published applications and toolsets appear in the Catalog, making it the collaboration hub for the organization.

Because publication exposes a resource widely, every publication request requires administrator approval. This review step is what makes the public space trustworthy: users can rely on published resources having passed a gate. Publication also enables versioning in practice — you can publish a stable version while continuing to develop the next one privately, without disturbing what others are using.

Sharing and publication compared​

SharingPublication
AudienceSpecific users you chooseAll authenticated users, or a restricted set by role
ApprovalNoneAdministrator approval required
Where the resource livesStays in the owner's private spaceA copy is placed in the public space. The original stays in the owner's private space
Typical useFeedback, co-development, small teamsReleasing a finished asset to the organization

Collaboration between deployments​

Collaboration is not limited to people. Applications and toolsets — collectively, deployments — can also be granted access to resources or to each other, so an agent can act on a user's resources or call another deployment as part of a workflow. This is the same access-control model applied to non-human actors, and it is what lets multi-agent applications operate on shared data safely.

Further reading​