Shared memory across a team
How organization admins oversee shared memory in Dropstone. Reviewing what has been shared, removing entries, setting a retention window, and how secrets are kept out.
Memory in teams and organizations explains shared memory from a member's point of view: three levels, sharing is the author's decision, how conflicts are resolved. This page is the admin side.
What admins can see
From the organization's dashboard, an admin can list every memory that has been shared to a team or to the organization: what it says, who shared it, which team or the whole organization, and when.
Admins cannot see members' private memories. Only shared entries are visible, because only shared entries are the organization's concern.
Removing a shared memory
An admin can remove any shared memory. It stops being applied for everyone immediately. This is the right tool for a shared note that is wrong, out of date, or should not have been shared.
The author of a memory can also withdraw it themselves, which returns it to private.
Retention
An organization can set a retention window for shared memory. Shared entries older than the window are retired automatically. This keeps the organization's shared knowledge from accumulating conventions nobody follows any more.
Retention applies to shared memory only. Members' private memories are not touched.
Secrets
Before any memory can be shared, it is scanned for content that looks like a credential, a token, or a key. A memory that matches cannot be shared until the author removes that content. This runs on every share, at every level.
It is a safeguard, not a substitute for care. If you see a shared memory that contains something it should not, remove it and let us know through How to get support.
Encouraging good sharing
Shared memory is most useful when it holds things the whole team would otherwise each learn the hard way: the deploy order, the one config file that matters, the reason a decision was made. It is least useful when it holds one person's taste.
A few habits that help:
- Share decisions and their reasons, not preferences.
- Share to the narrowest level that needs it. A note about one team's service belongs to that team, not the organization.
- Review the shared list periodically and retire what is stale. The retention window helps, but a quick look catches what it cannot.
Isolation
Shared memory is scoped strictly. Memory shared to a team is invisible to other teams in the same organization. Memory shared to an organization is invisible outside it. There is no path by which one organization's memory reaches another.
Why it is worth doing
Shared memory is what makes an organization's assistant improve as a whole rather than one person at a time: a convention shared to a team is recalled in every colleague's session, so each of them does not have to learn it again. See How Dropstone compounds in an organization.