Obsidian for Teams opportunity

I manage a large engineering team and we are considering using Obsidian as a replacement for our current wiki. I firmly believe that reducing the friction involved in updating our wiki will improve both the quality and quantity of our internal documentation, and Obsidian makes the process nearly 100% friction-free. I have something setup that is functional, butit is hacky and imperfect and I’m unlikely to move forward with it. For example, I am using Perlite to provide a web UI for reading the wiki, but it is not aware of plugins and does not render them properly, causing divergence between the desktop application and an online view.

I believe a team-oriented product is a major opportunity for your team and urge you to consider it if you are not doing so already. Getting it into a team environment would result in rapid internal spread and a large number of business user licenses. And if you ARE already considering this, please share some info so I can avoid wasting time looking elsewhere! Conversely, if your position is “we will never do this” that would also be helpful to know.

Some specific elements that are key to my uses (and I am certain are key to those of many other customers based upon searching your forum) are:

  • Keep all data on-premises - no cloud component unless we can host it ourselves.
  • Sync across multiple users without requiring them to have knowledge of git.
  • Maintain a sync’ed, on-premises static version of the website that properly renders plugins in addition to core obsidian/markdown formatting.
  • Prevent non-“admins” from making changes to the vault configuration (plugins, etc) while still allowing them to maintain some local preferences, storage of window state, etc. (perhaps allow user prefs to sit above managed vault prefs in a cascading way?)

This is in line with many, many other requests, e.g.:

Thanks for considering this.

edit: as further evidence of a desire for this, I was initially prevented from posting this because the title “Obsidian for Teams” had already been used

4 Likes

This is possible already

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/obsidian-sync-self-hosted-server/20975

This is a mix of https://forum.obsidian.md/t/obsidian-publish-support-of-plugins-that-are-rendering-text-in-preview/23019
and https://forum.obsidian.md/t/enterprisey-private-publishing/9340

This is a good idea and you should open a specific FR about this. “Implementing an access control system in Obsidian Sync”. However, I foresee 2 issues. 1) The notes are still files and the users may still be able to circumvent the restrictions by accessing the notes/config thru the OS file manager. 2) Obsidian Sync is end to end encrypted, so the server can’t enforce anything because the server doesn’t know what is what.

This is a good idea and you should open a specific FR about this. “Implementing an access control system in Obsidian Sync”. However, I foresee 2 issues. 1) The notes are still files and the users may still be able to circumvent the restrictions by accessing the notes/config thru the OS file manager. 2) Obsidian Sync is end to end encrypted, so the server can’t enforce anything because the server doesn’t know what is what.

Thanks, will do. This is a guess but perhaps the server could inform Obsidian which files it is permitted or not permitted to sync. Not security in a strict sense because an alternate client could ignore those directives, but it’s a way to maintain the server’s lack of file knowledge.