Collaborating and sharing

Whether you're working in a public or private project, Kumu makes it easy to collaborate with others and share your work. This guide is a hub of information related to collaborating and sharing, including these topics:

Public vs. private projects

When you create a new project from your Kumu dashboard, you'll be prompted to choose whether it should be public or private, and the option you choose will affect how you can share your finished project.

Public projects can be viewed by anyone who has the link, and they can be edited by you and anyone you add as a contributor. They are also indexed by search engines—that is, people can potentially find your project online if they search for the right keywords. Finally, public projects can be forked by other Kumu users, allowing them to build upon your work and offer new insights.

Public projects are free, and you can create as many as you want, no matter what account you own or plan you're subscribed to.

We love it when you share your work, but we know that it's sometimes necessary to keep it under wraps! For that purpose, we offer private projects. Private projects don't get indexed by search engines, and they can only be viewed by you and anyone you have added as a contributor. Private projects are a paid service—check out our guide on accounts and workspaces to see a full list of pricing options.

Both public and private projects can be shared using presentations and share/embed links, and private projects allow you to password-protect your presentations for an added layer of security.

Finally, you can learn more about privacy and security by visiting our privacy policy and our security policy. And, if your privacy needs are particularly strict (e.g. data needs to be stored in a specific geographic area, or you need to have deeper control over security technology), we recommend checking out Kumu Enterprise.

Add a contributor

Add a contributor to a Basic workspace project

To add a contributor to a project inside a Basic workspace, you first need to make sure the contributor has their own Kumu account. If they don't have one yet, they can sign up for free. Once they have signed up, you can open your project settings, click on MEMBERS, type in the contributor's Kumu username, and click "Add contributor".

Anytime you add a contributor to a project (public or private) owned by your personal account, you are granting them view and edit access. However, they won't be able to add other contributors, change project privacy, or rename, transfer, or delete the project.

Add a contributor to a Pro workspace project

When you're adding a contributor to a project in a Pro workspace, you have a few more options.

For simpler use cases, you can follow exactly the same steps outlined above for adding collaborators to a Basic workspace. After you add someone to a project, you'll be able to choose whether they have view-only, edit, or admin access.

In more complex cases, though, you might want to give somebody a certain level of access to all projects in the Pro workspace. To do that efficiently, you'll invite them as a member of your Pro workspace. See our full guide on Pro workspaces for more info on how to add members and set their access levels for your projects.

Handle conflicting changes

If you're editing your project, and somebody else is editing at the same time, their changes won't appear on your screen in real-time (and vice-versa). Instead of showing real-time changes, Kumu waits until you refresh the page to sync you up with your team and show you the most up-to-date version of your project.

If you happen to edit the same part of the map at the same time (whether that's an element name, map description, view, or something else), Kumu will detect this and prompt you to review any conflicts.

Let's walk through a quick example. Say you and a teammate both happened to be mapping influential people in Silicon Valley one afternoon. You both click on Reid and decide that his bio needs a bit of sprucing up. You save your changes and SURPRISE! The below screen pops up to let you know that you're not the only one editing Reid's bio today.

You click "Get started" and see a window that highlights the changes between your version and the version on our servers. Lines you've added show up as blue text with a "+'' sign in front. Lines that you've deleted or someone else has added show up as red text with a "-" sign in front.

Now you're in charge. Choose which text you want to keep and which you want to remove. Make any remaining corrections and then remove any "+" or "-" added in the merge process. You're finished when you see all grey text:

If there are multiple conflicts, you'll be taken through each conflict one by one. Once you see this screen:

...you're all set. If only handling conflicts in the real world was this easy!

Create a presentation

Presentations combine the best of PowerPoint, Prezi, and Kumu into one easy-to-use tool. You can create a new presentation and edit existing presentations by clicking the menu icon in the upper left of your map, then clicking PRESENTATIONS. For more info on the power of presentations, watch the video below, or check out our full guide on presentations

Share/embed links make it easy to send somebody an interactive, read-only version of your map, or embed that version on a blog or website. To create a share/embed link, click the ellipsis icon in the bottom toolbar, then choose "Share / embed this map". For more information about share/embed links, including customizeable options, check out the full guide.

Create a screenshot

If you need to share a static screenshot of your map (for example, in another presentation software or in print), there are two ways to go about it.

PNG

To quickly snap a PNG screenshot of your map, click on the export icon in the bottom-right corner of your project and select "Export to PNG". Note that the screenshot will be taken at your current position and scale on the map—if you'd like everything to be centered, click the zoom-fit icon in the zoom toolbar, or press \ on your keyboard.

When Kumu brings up your screenshot, you can right-click the image and select "Save image as..." to save the image to your computer.

PDF

If you need a hi-res screenshot that can scale up or down to any size (for example, when you're printing a Kumu map on a large poster), you can create hi-res PDF files.

Click the export icon in the bottom-right corner of your project and select "Export to PDF". Fill out any of the layout info for your PDF and click "Export PDF" at the bottom. PDFs are free and unlimited for all projects in all workspaces.