Vault Item Sharing

@bw-admin - but when? Your roadmap said first half of 2023. Is there going to be an updated roadmap? I need an answer to make plans accordingly.

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Would Bitwarden Families not accomplish something similar for your needs? IDK just suggesting

nope - need to the ability to share beyond just 5 people and to be able to share items discreetly with some members and not others. Lastpass let’s us setup a shared folder which is fine, but some items should only be shared with one user and not all others. Sharing with all others creates a security risk as some of these items that need to be shared grant high-level access to sensitive administrative and/or accounting functions.

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The biggest feature Bitwarden is still missing is to share credentials “easily”. Currently it is a huge hassle to share them. It should be possible to share a folder or a separate vault with a right click and either invite the user or share it as a link for all with a password. If I now share an account with an “organization” and then change something, this must be adjusted in the organization and in my personal vault. Keeper solves this with a shortcut(alias) to an existing login, so all changes are applied. With Keeper you can also create a shared folder and share it easily with external users.

2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Add a “easy” vault or folder sharing feature

Any Feedback or plans for the implementation of this feature?

Any update on this item?

@bw-admin looks like you guys have removed the last roadmap that said ‘first half of 2023’ for Easy Vault sharing and now it’s been moved into ‘Under Research’?

Is that correct then that there is now NO timeline or certainty of when an improved vault sharing method is added?

I’ve been waiting to migrate my entire business and about 20 family and friends over to bitwarden, but we cannot make the transition away from Lastpass with the your vault / item sharing framework as it stands.

Some more clarity on this would be very helpful…

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Hi @winedog,

The team is balancing a number of priorities and still plans to pursue this feature. It will happen in the future, and as you state, there is not a fixed release time at this moment.

Bitwarden handles sharing via collections, which provides a secure and organized method to share credentials. Business and family plans can create an unlimited number of collections which provide a mechanism to keep sharing between large numbers of users well organized.

We understand your interests, and would welcome you to explore using collections to suit your needs.

Another option is to use Bitwarden Send.

Often I want to securly send a passwort to non bitwarden-user.
It would be perfect, if I could create a bitwarden send from a password entry.
There could be a new point to the context menu e.g.

I have seen elsewhere BW say this is in the plan.

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Feature name

  • Ability to share individual org items with users

Feature function

  • Currently, to share a single item with a user, a whole new collection has to be created.
  • This new feature will avoid having to create those collections and just share an item directly with a user.

Related topics + references

related feature request from '21 – Ability to share individual org items with users/groups

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Just adding a comment to note how useful this feature would be for my company.

I have a bunch of situations where a manager wants to share specific credentials with one of their subordinates or someone they’re working on a project with. But these are generally just one credential to share with that one person and they’re not standard, they vary per relationship.

The only way we’ve figured out to do this is to have them submit a ticket to me, to create a new collection that is called “Manager-Employee”, and add them both to it. This is not a great experience for the users, firstly. Secondly, because this is the go-to way to do this, now my organization has a pile of these “Manager-Employee” collections adding unnecessary complexity when it can and should just be something between those users.

As the Bitwarden Enterprise admin, having to be the arbiter of creating collections and assignment rights to allow people to share credentials with each other to do their job is… not great.

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Hi @ThreeStrikesTrigger Thanks for sharing!
One option for 1-1 sharing is Bitwarden Send. This keeps the sharer in complete control.
Another option is to assign select folks in the company to the Bitwarden manager role where they can create collections on their own.
In addition, there is A LOT of new functionality planned here in the beginning of 2024. Stay tuned!

How? It doesn’t seem like any credentials shared there are updated automatically. I genuinely don’t understand Send’s purpose - it just seems like a bad encrypted messenger.

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I’ve used Send to send a remote user’s temporary passwords before when I’ve had to reset it for them. It’s good for stuff like that, where you want to be able to send to anyone, and that you want it to expire. Since you can send files as well, it’s pretty flexible.

But I also don’t really think this solves the 1:1 credential sharing need, because that credential needs to work like any other - persistent for both reference and if it is changed/updated, especially if it has a TOTP token associated to it. Copying and pasting it into Send and sending it to another employee doesn’t solve that, and realistically, even if I tell them to, none of my employees are going to actually do that when they can just write it on a sticky note and walk down the hall with it to produce the same results. Or just send it via SMS/Messenger. Sending a credential to a coworker via Send, as it exists right now, is at best a workaround.

Looking forward to 2024’s updates, in any case.

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While I think the improvement quoted above will help with the inconveniences alluded to in @ThreeStrikesTrigger’s post, their comment (quoted below) addresses one of my remaining questions/concerns with sharing vault items via send. After the send is completed and added to the recipient’s vault, I imagine the individual vault items will become stale / out of date once a password is reset or another attribute such as TOTP gets updated unless there is a sync mechanism with the shared vault item.

I’m still happy sharing a vault item is improving with the in-progress share vault item via send feature as it’ll add some convenience to sharing credentials (even though they may get stale).

Feature function

There are three parts to the this feature request.

  1. Allow for the selection of a Recipient within the same organization when creating a Send.
  2. Add a “Password” type (in addition to Text and File types) of Send. This would basically contain all the fields in the “Add Item” dialog (name, username, password, url, etc)
  3. Notify users when they receive such a Send, and allow them to import this into their vault.

This will enable organization admins to onboard users more easily. They can simply send the new user a bunch of passwords, instead of creating user-specific collections which are a pain to maintain. Any time an account is created on behalf of a user, the password can then be communicated in a secure fashion, with minimal friction.

Related topics

This is similar to the Vault Item Sharing feature request, but I believe my proposal is easier to implement and will also cover their desire functionality.

Brownie points if this can be automated using the API.

Agree with all your points and @ThreeStrikesTrigger as well.

Bitwarden Send does have some good use cases, but it really doesn’t work in a multi-user or enterprise environment. Especially when you have passwords that must be updated every 30-90 days which is increasingly common and are being shared with discrete user access levels in a business environment (Sales staff vs. HR staff vs. Accounts vs. Management)

The reality is that many businesses, and even family environments, have the need for very granular control of passwords. Passwords to access the family home netflix account might be needed by Parents and children, but access to the electric company, phone company or the home security system login would only be between the two Parents.

I loathe Lastpass for their dereliction of their duties the last several years, but their system of being able to share from a personal vault to many other lastpass users solves what is a very common and practical need. I desperately want to stop paying Lastpass and send my business and my family to bitwarden, but the sharing system at present is not administratively practical. If Bitwarden could match sharing with the same ease, I alone would be responsible for migrating 30 paying members of LastPass to Bitwarden

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Any update on when the feature is released?

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