Sharing with your team
Once the folder is published, sharing the map is sharing the link. Send it however you normally would — email, Teams, an intranet page.
What users see
When someone pastes the link into Groundwork’s Cloud storage card and clicks Open:
- If the folder is private, they’re asked to sign in with their Dropbox account first (a one-off — Groundwork remembers the sign-in).
- All layers from your project load with your symbology and labels, the first layer becomes the active layer, and the map zooms to fit the data.
- Layers you left unticked in QGIS load hidden, ready to be shown when needed.
They can then browse, search, filter, and edit features — the User Guide walks them through all of it. Pointing new users at that guide is the easiest handover.
How edited data comes back
.qgs project file is never touched.To be ready for that, share the folder with your team as members with edit access rather than relying on a view-only public link. Members sign in to Dropbox when they open the map; people using a public link can view and edit locally, but their edits can never be saved back.
Until write-back lands, edits are saved in each user’s browser on their own device, and the published files stay exactly as you put them. In the interim, a user can hand you their work with the layer’s ⋮ menu → Download GeoJSON, and you can replace the file in the folder to republish it.
A note on Groundwork’s own share links
Groundwork also has an in-app Share action (on the map’s ⋮ menu) that copies a link recreating the current map view. Those links intentionally don’t carry cloud-project layers — for maps published through Dropbox, the folder link is the thing to share.
Embedding Groundwork in another page
If you embed Groundwork in an intranet page or portal with an iframe, give the frame enough room for both the map canvas and the Data panel, and avoid placing it inside another small scrolling panel. In embedded mode, Groundwork follows the standard web-map pattern: scrolling the page over the map does not zoom it by accident, and users can use Ctrl + scroll when they do want to zoom the map.
Embedding suits read-only workflows — viewing, browsing and inspecting features — rather than editing. Editing a map held in a cloud folder needs a sign-in that Dropbox and Microsoft both refuse to show inside a frame, so an embed pointed at a cloud workspace should be expected to misbehave or not work. Editing a local map inside a frame does work. When your users need to capture or change cloud-held data, give them a full-page link instead of an embed.
Two other differences inside a frame. The browser’s back and forward buttons belong to the page around Groundwork, so they move that page rather than stepping through features as they do at a full-page link. And for private cloud folders, check the embed in the same browser environment your team uses — some browsers and organisational settings restrict sign-in or storage inside third-party iframes.
Next: Troubleshooting.