Notebook collaboration

With notebook collaboration for IBM® Spectrum Conductor, cluster administrators, consumer administrators, or owners of a notebook with the Data Scientist role can share that notebook with multiple users known as collaborators, allowing these users to view and manage that notebook's files.

When you are adding a notebook or updating the configuration for a notebook from the Notebook Management page, you can enable notebook collaboration for the notebook under the deployment settings. For more information, see Adding notebooks.

When that notebook is enabled for an instance group, administrators can create the notebook and assign any user that has permission to submit Spark jobs for the owning instance group consumer to own the notebook (see Assigning notebooks to owners). The notebook service runs under the notebook owner, who can own more than one notebook in the same instance group.
Note: Notebook owners can own only one notebook of the same notebook type (Zeppelin, Jupyter, etc.).

The cluster administrator, consumer administrator, or owner of a notebook with the Data Scientist role can then assign any user that has permission to submit Spark jobs for the owning instance group consumer as a notebook collaborator. Notebook collaborators can create, edit, and delete notebook files, and view the changes that are made to notebook files by other collaborators. Any user can be a collaborator for multiple notebooks in an instance group, and can collaborate on multiple notebooks of the same notebook type in the same instance group.

Notebook collaboration limitations

When you are using notebook collaboration, take note of the following limitations:
  • When you update the configuration for a notebook from the Notebook Management page, you can clear the Enable collaboration for the notebook option to disable collaboration for the notebook. Existing collaborators that are configured for the notebook are able to continue accessing the notebook services, but collaborators can no longer be added or removed.
  • Notebook collaborators are not able to view Spark jobs that are submitted from the notebook by the notebook owner. Only the cluster administrator, consumer administrator, and the notebook owner can view these jobs from the Instance Groups page, under the Applications tab. Only the notebook owner can view these jobs from the My Applications & Notebooks page.
  • When you upgrade IBM Spectrum Conductor to a new version that supports notebook collaboration, you must also ensure that the notebook version packages are updated to support notebook collaboration. If the notebook version does not support notebook collaboration, you can enable notebook collaboration and assign collaborators for the notebook, but the collaborators are unable to log in to the notebook portals. The following notebook versions support notebook collaboration:
    • Zeppelin 0.7.0 and higher
    • Jupyter 4.1.0 and higher