Mural basics

Learn the basics of Mural, such as account structure, object types, and user types.

How do people use Mural?

When written in lower-case, a mural is an individual canvas, which is the background or surface upon which you add, create, and edit your content. These can be created newly from templates, or from a blank slate. When written Mural, it refers to the company, software, and brand as a whole.

Individuals and teams can collaborate autonomously and with consultants in their murals using Facilitation Superpowersยฎ.

Mural uses a certain account structure to help collaborators stay organized and keep their content secure. โ€œCollaboratorโ€ is our general term for members, visitors, and guests to your mural. At a high level, the Mural organizational structure has workspaces, rooms, and folders.

APIs provide endpoints to allow data analysis and the flow of content to and from murals.

Account structure and object types

Mural uses a certain structure to help collaborators stay organized. From a technical perspective, the different elements of Mural's structure are referred to as "objects." Here is a table breaking down each object type:

Object typeDescriptionHelp Center article
WorkspaceYour workspace is where you collaborate with your organization in Mural. Anyone using Mural can be part of multiple workspaces.

Enterprise customers can create and manage multiple workspaces. Other plans are limited to one workspace.

A workspace can contain multiple rooms.
Check out our Help center article on workspaces.
RoomRooms are an efficient way of organizing murals for different projects. Each room can contain several folders and murals.

Rooms are either open, private, or confidential:

โ€ข Open rooms are for everyone in your workspace.

โ€ข Private rooms can only be seen by those invited in.

โ€ข Confidential rooms offer an added level of security and are only available on our Enterprise plans.

A room can contain multiple murals.
Check out our Help center article on rooms.
MuralA mural (lowercase) is where you can collaborate on an individual canvas to add, create, and edit your content.

Create murals from templates or from a blank slate. You can also create a custom template from your own mural. Click here to open a Help center article on templates.
Check out our Help center article on murals.

To learn more about the Mural structure, read our article on how Mural accounts are organized.

User types

At Mural, we call our users โ€œcollaborators.โ€ Collaborators are the people working with you in your mural.

Not everyone has the same collaboration needs, so we have different types of collaborators. At a high level, here are the types of collaborators:

  • Company Admins: Specific to enterprise accounts and the Mural enterprise API, this is a company-level Mural admin.
  • Workspace Admins: Higher-level users. Workspace Admins manage users, workspaces, and settings.
  • Members: Core team people; can fully collaborate.
  • Guests: People outside your company who have been invited to participate.
  • Visitors: People with temporary access; can be anonymous.
    Visitors can only access the Mural UI through Mural's web app or local (mobile, desktop) app. They can't access the Mural UI through your app, since an anonymous visitor can't authenticate with OAuth 2.0.
  • Restricted members: People who aren't members of a room but are invited to a mural. The restricted member will have access only to the mural they were invited to but not the room. So, they can't create a mural in that room.

To learn more about permissions for each type of collaborator, see our Help Center article on types of collaborators in Mural.

To read about how to invite people to your mural, read our Help Center article on inviting collaborators to your mural.