Decide which workspaces to create

Workspaces can be created for different purposes and for different audiences. These are the four main reasons for splitting documents into different workspaces:

  1. Permission reason:
    • Within most organizations there are certain documents that should only be accessible by a subset of the employees. The easiest way to accomplish this is by setting unique permissions on each of these workspaces.
    • Most of the MetaShare users typically set up these confidential workspaces:
      • Board (for sensitive documents that the board of directors work with that should not be disclosed to others)
      • Management (for sensitive documents that the management team work with that should not be disclosed to others)
      • HR (for sensitive documents such as employment contracts, salary information, medical certificates, etc.)
      • Finance (for sensitive financial documents that should not be disclosed to others)
  2. Structural reason:
    • Depending on what types of documents you are working on, you would probably want to have different ways to structure them. As an example, when it comes to typical document filter such as “Area” and “Document type”, you would probably want to have different choices in the HR workspace:
      HR filters
      than in the Financial workspace:
      Finance filters
    • In MetaShare you can configure different workspace configurations to manage different content types (which metadata fields to show and which of them should be mandatory/optional), which fields to show as document filters and columns in the document view and which document templates to suggest, based on selected metadata. Typical workspace configurations that we create for our clients, based on structural reasons are:
      • General
        • For general workspaces where you want to store documents that span over multiple work areas.
        • Many clients create a larger workspace where most of their general documents are stored.
        • The management team’s workspace is normally based on this workspace configuration.
        • Normally configured with columns such as “Area” (general for all types of documents), “Document type” (general for all types of documents) and “Keyword” (only for general documents).
      • Agreement
        • For the workspace(s) where you want to store your agreements and be able to manage them in a structured way, with agreement specific metadata.
        • Some clients create several agreement workspaces, depending on who should be able to access them (one open for all employees, the others limited to only a subset of individuals).
        • Normally configured with columns such as “Type of agreement”, “Agreement status” and “Counterpart”.
      • Board
        • For the workspace where you want your board to store their documents and be able to manage them in a structured way, with board specific metadata.
        • Normally configured with columns such as “Document type” (specific for board documents), “Year” and “Meeting date”.
      • Financial
        • For the workspace(s) where you want your finance team to store their documents and be able to manage them in a structured way, with finance specific metadata.
        • Some clients create several financial workspaces, depending on who should be able to access them (one open for all employees, the others limited to only a subset of individuals).
        • Normally configured with columns such as “Area” (specific for financial documents), “Document type” (specific for financial documents), “Year” and “Period”.
      • HR
        • For the workspace(s) where you want your HR team to store their documents and be able to manage them in a structured way, with HR specific metadata.
        • Some clients create several HR workspaces, depending on who should be able to access them (one open for all employees, the others limited to only a subset of individuals).
        • Normally configured with columns such as “Area” (specific for HR-documents), “Document type” (specific for HR-documents) and “Social security number”.
      • Project
        • For the workspace(s) where you want to store your project documents and be able to manage them in a structured way, with project specific metadata.
        • Some clients create only one project workspace, where documents will be tagged with “Project number” or similar, to be able to filter out documents belonging to a specific project. For projects where the documents should be managed by permissions, the recommendation would be to create a workspace per project.
        • Normally configured with columns such as “Project name” (if project documents are stored in one workspace), “Project phase”, “Document type” (specific for projects) and “Keyword”.
      • Steering document
        • For the workspace(s) where you want to store your steering documents, e.g. Policies, Strategies, Plans or Instructions and be able to manage them in a structured way and be able to set up mandatory reminders to review them on a regular basis.
        • Some clients create only one workspace for its steering documents and apply “Draft item security” on the workspace, to ensure that the employees only will see the approved and published steering documents. Others have two workspaces, one for approved steering documents, normally in PDF-format, the other for the editable Office documents, only accessible by the editors of steering documents.
        • Normally configured with columns such as “Area” (specific for steering documents), “Document type” (specific for steering documents), “Document owner” and “Review date”.
      • Archive
        • For documents that have been migrated from file servers, using the method described on this page.
        • Normally only configured with basic metadata such as “Created”, “Created by”, “Modified”, “Modified by” and “Folder” (the folder where the document was stored on the file server).
  3. Collaborative reason:
    • In projects or in certain departments, you may want to work in a workspace where you only see the documents that are related to the project/department. The workspace members get a cleaner view of the project’s/department’s documentation and other workspaces do not get cluttered with documents that might only be of a temporary nature such as meeting notes.
    • You might also want to set up individual access-rights to specific project workspaces.
  4. Large amount of documents:
    • If there are very many documents of a certain type, for example invoices, they could be stored in a separate workspace, to not clutter other workspaces. The amount of documents in a workspace could be much more than 5 000 but once you pass this limit there will be certain limitations. Se this page for more information about how to optimize large workspaces: How do I index columns in workspaces with more than 5 000 documents?

Regardless of what reason you have to create a new workspace, before you create the workspace, you should first decide which configuration the workspace should have. If it would make it easier to manage the documents in the workspace with different metadata, different filters, different documents view, different document rules, then consider creating a new workspace configuration first.

Once you have decided which workspaces you want to create, our recommendation would be to create some test workspaces based on sample workspace configurations, and once they have been created, you can start to involve your colleagues to get feedback regarding their information structures and to also create other workspace configurations.