Collections

Collections gather together logins, notes, cards, and identities for secure sharing from an organization. Think of collections as organization-equivalents to folders, with a few key differences:

• Organizations control access to organization-owned items by assigning users or groups to collections.

• Organization-owned items must be included in at least one collection.

For many organizations, using collections means adding a set of vault items and individually assigning users to that collection. Some common methods for constructing scaleable collections include Collections by Department (for example, users from your marketing team are assigned to a Marketing collection), or Collections by Function (for example, users from your marketing team are assigned to a Social Media collection):

Teams and Enterprise organizations can also designate access to collections based on user groups, rather than individual users. Group-collection associations provide a deeper level of access control and scalability to sharing resources. One common group-collection methodology is to create Groups by Department and Collections by Function, for example:

Other common methodologies include Collections by Vendor or System (for example, users in an Engineering group are assigned to a AWS Credentials collection) and Groups by Locality (for example users are assigned to a US Employees group or UK Employees group).

Organization managers (or higher) and provider users can create and manage collections. To create a collection:

1. Log in to your web vault and open your organization.

2. In the Vault tab, select the New button and choose Collection from the dropdown:

   

3. Give your collection a Name and, optionally, select a collection to nest this collection under.

   tip

   The External Id field is only relevant if you are using Directory Connector.

4. In the Access tab, assign access to any existing members or groups. For each selection, assign the appropriate level of permission.

5. Select Save to finish creating your collection.

Collections can be "nested" in order to logically organize them within your vault:

Nested collections are for display-purposes only. They will not inherit items, access, or permissions from their "parent" collection.

To create a nested collection, follow the steps above and select a parent collection from the Nest collection under dropdown.

You may find that you need to add or remove users or groups from a collection, or delete it entirely. These actions can be done from the Vault view by using the  Options menu for the collection, or by opening the collection and using the  button:

Users with access to multiple collections within your organization can move a vault item from one collection to another, or add a vault item to multiple collections. Unlike creating a collection, this can be done from any Bitwarden app: