So I’ve been looking at how everything works with Bitwarden, and honestly it has been a pain over the past years to manage things, more specifically in the personal vault because of the folder philosophy.
Can’t we just scratch the idea of folders and use collections in personal vaults? Obviously without any permission rights given it is a personal vault.
Better yet, the Organization vault name should just be changed to Vault or Shared vault so it makes more sense for people using it that are not companies.
This seems like it would be such a big improvement in ease of use and understanding what everything is for non-organization accounts, and it would make the product simpler too. And extra bonus if we can search by collection as if it was a tag (which is pretty much that).
The aim is to simplify things. In organizations you have collections. They function exactly as folders as far as I am concerned. You tag an item with that collection and you can click on the collection to see the items tagged in it. The collection also has the bonus you can give rights to users, so essentially it works. Even more, you can tag one credential with different collections as well. And you can also have a hierarchy.
So collections is simply the superior version of folders and it simply looks redundant. The point is, just remove the lesser version of it (folders) and bring it to the personal vault (without the need of rights management).
This could make things simpler for everyone to understand what is going on. As a normal user I simply don’t care about collections and folders. All I see is a structured vault where there are credentials, be it a personal vault or a shared vault.
And an extra bonus, collections are more elegantly managed, unlike folders. Try making subfolders and then guessing the name of the folder that is nested 3 folders deep which when you select it you can only see “A/B/C…” … A/B/C what? A/B/C/D/E? A/B/C/D? A/B/C/D/F?
What I want is indeed tags, which is in fact named collections in bitwarden with reduced functionality as tags and more aimed at right management. But the functionality of Collections (tags) is identical and improved from the functionality of folders, making folders redundant. This functionality should be brought over to personal vaults and get rid of folders altogether.
With a few improvements to collections they could become such a powerful thing, and it would be worthwhile to focus on only tags rather than two separate things out of which one does the exact same thing as the other and more.
The request for tags has been open since 2018 without any movement, when the “tag” system is already in place in organizations. Although it works a bit odd, I don’t see why any reasons for it to not replace folders when (again) it can do the exact same thing as folders and more.
I should clarify that Collections are not a parallel to Folders, Collections and Folders are orthogonal to each other.
A Collection can be used to define a set of shared vault items that have a common set of access permissions.
However, if you are a user with view access to a Collection, you can organize those collection items into a Folder structure that you have customized. For example, you can have a Folder that contains both shared and unshared vault items, and you can place items from the same Collection into different Folders. Moreover, another user with access to the same Collection will be able to set up their own Folder structure for organizing the Collection’s items (as well as items from their Individual vault), and their Folders do not need to bear any resemblance to the first user’s Folders.
Another important distinction is that while vault items can only belong to a single Folder, they can be assigned to more than one Collection. In this manner, Collections bear some resemblance to tags.