The proliferation of tools that support remote and flexible working is driving a need for workspaces that can accommodate multiple teams and projects. As a result, many organizations have more than one active workspace and managing these environments can be time-consuming and frustrating for users. The right way to plan for and manage multiple workspaces depends on the intent of the business processes and how the teams will collaborate in the future. Using this article as a guide, you can learn how to better organize your workspaces and business processes to make them easier to navigate, maintain, and use. AI-powered ERPÂ
When deciding whether to use a single or multiple workspaces, consider the intent for collaboration as well as the type of content that will be created and managed. Depending on these factors, it may be best to create a narrowly defined workspace that is only intended for specific collaborative processes, such as creating or revising a specific document. Alternatively, it may be more useful to split up more complex processes into multiple workspaces. This allows the creation of more detailed ownership and management responsibilities for each workflow. It also helps to provide a more granular security model, allowing for fine-grained permissions on individual workspace items.
Each workspace is a distinct set of processes, cases, and data within the Process Workspace application. This approach provides a separation of data, processes, and people from the wider application, and helps to minimize data contamination across workspaces. In addition, each workspace is a dedicated database in MySQL and its files are located in a separate directory, making it easy to back up and restore the contents of a workspace independently of other workspaces.
A common practice is to separate data workspaces from reporting workspaces. A data workspace is primarily focused on storing and securing the contents of data items such as lakehouse tables, data pipelines, dataflows, and semantic models. A reporting workspace focuses more on downstream analytical activities, such as self-service BI. Reporting workspaces primarily (but not exclusively) include Power BI content.
In addition to the centralized storage and backup, the benefits of workspaces also include collaborative features such as document management and task tracking. This simplifies teamwork and enhances accountability by enabling all stakeholders to view project status at a glance. In addition, tools such as Asana help to simplify task assignment and progress monitoring, and can be used in combination with workspaces to further improve productivity.
If you have a large number of workspaces, it can become challenging to find the correct item when searching for a document or report. In this case, it is often necessary to implement naming conventions and other metadata to improve search results. Broadly defined workspaces can also run into technical limitations in terms of the number of items that can be stored and supported. Additionally, a broad workspace might require more work from an auditing perspective. Ultimately, it's best to limit the number of workspaces to those that are required by a business process and the organization's security requirements.