Working with workspaces

Workspaces are a very powerful and flexible concept of OpenGoo for organizing information and controlling user rights. On the other hand, workspaces are not easy to understand for everybody, so make sure you know how to make use of this feature.

Basically all information in OpenGoo is organized in workspaces. Other collaboration software have projects or folders to organize information; workspaces are similar, but not the same. Here are some facts about workspaces:

• A workspace can represent a client, a project or any other object in a classification system you use. Workspaces are a generic concept, they get their meaning just by their name.
• Workspaces can contain other workspaces. In other words you can build hierarchies of workspaces with up to 10 levels.¹⁾ (But be careful: Many workspaces or a complex structure bear the potential of putting information into the wrong workspace, which makes it invisible for the intended audience or even accessibly for unauthorized users.)
• Workspaces are different from folders in that respect that you can not only see what's inside a workspace but also what's inside all sub-workspaces of that workspace. That's the reason why workspaces are much more like filters than like folders.
• Workspaces are used to control permissions in OpenGoo. You can grant a user the right to work with a certain workspace and hide another workspace completely from him. There are even more detailed permission parameters (which are discussed in more detail on the understanding user rights page).

The most obvious way for selecting a workspace is to have the left sidebar open and to click on a workspace. As long as you don't hide your sidebar, this is the preferred method.

If your left sidebar is hidden, then you have two possibilities:

1. Click somewhere below the arrow button in the sidebar. This will open the left sidebar only temporarily; as soon as you move your mouse pointer outside the sidebar, it will disappear automatically.

2. Move your mouse over the workspace title in the upper left of your screen. This will bring up a slider with all workspaces that are one level below the current workspace.

If you are not on the top level of the workspace hierarchy (All), then you will see the path of the current workspace. We call this the workspace breadcrumb:

The workspace breadcrumb works very similar to a traditional breadcrumb navigation, so clicking on a workspace within the path takes you there immediately.

On the dashboard (Overview tab) you not only see the name of the current workspace (Client A in this example) but usually a description of the workspace as well.

In list views there is no workspace title. But for every item in the list you can see the workspace it belongs to (right at the beginning of each line, in the color of the respective workspace).

There are two ways how you can edit the workspace properties. The most common way is to select a workspace in the left sidebar and then click on the properties icon on the top:

If you are an administrator you can go to the administration panel. There you get an alphabetically ordered list with all workspaces in your OpenGoo installation that lets you edit or delete any workspace:

Since workspaces are hierarchical, every workspace has its Parent Workspace. By changing this setting you can move a workspace to another position in the worspace hierarchy. When doing so OpenGoo will ask you: Do you want to inherit all permissions from parent workspace? Click OK to inherit the permissions from the new parent workspace, or click Cancel if you want to keep only the existing permissions for your workspace.

Workspaces can be deleted either on the Edit Workspace screen (there you can delete only that specific workspace) or in the Workspaces section of the administration panel (if you are an administrator).

OpenGoo creates automatically a personal workspace for every user. As long as the default settings are not changed objects in this workspace are only visible to its owner.

At the beginning we told you that all information in OpenGoo is organised in workspaces. But once more workspaces are not as simple as folders: Most information types can belong to more than one workspace at once - only a few information types can only be assigned to one single workspace at a time.

When you are editing a single workspace object, the first thing you see is the current workspace (msauter_personal in this example):

Clicking on the current workspace brings up the workspace tree from the left side panel that lets you select another workspace (but only one):

The following object types are single workspace objects:

• Milestones
• Tasks

When you are editing a multiple workspace object, you will see the workspace tree very much like in the left sidebar (including the filtering option), but with a checkbox in front of each workspace. This lets you assign as many workspaces as you like for that object.

The following object types are multiple workspaces objects:

• Notes
• Contacts (includes a text field for roles)
• Companies
• Documents
• E-Mails²⁾
• Events³⁾
• Task templates
• Web links⁴⁾

If you do not explicitly change it, objects are allocated to the current workspace by default. If you set the workspace selector to All then a new object is allocated to your personal workspace by default.

The trash is a special workspace which contains objects that have been deleted (or more precisely: moved to the trash).