Common Components Help

AEF Help

Workspace Overview

A workspace is a collection of folders that contain documents and other information assembled to accomplish a particular business need, and people from different companies who can access the folder content. The workspace members can collaborate and share information by participating in Web meetings and discussions, and assigning tasks to each other. A workspace includes:

• Folders and subfolders

A folder is a container for documents and other items, such as Requests to Suppliers and quotations, that concern a particular subject. Your system may have predefined, recommended folders--such as Testing/QA, Prototype, and Design Specifications--that can be added to every workspace. You can also define custom folders for a workspace and define custom subfolders within folders. If they have the appropriate access, workspace members can view folder content, add and remove content, revise documents, participate in discussions about the content, route the content, and subscribe to be notified when specific events occur for a folder or its content.

• Members

You can add people from within your organization or from within any organization your company collaborates with. You can also add an entire role to a workspace, which gives access to any person from your company who is assigned to that role. If you associate the workspace with a Buyer Desk, all the people assigned to the Buyer Desk are added as members. You can designate certain members to be Workspace Leads. A Workspace Lead can add and remove people from the workspace and can assign workspace and default access privileges. Workspace Leads can also add and remove folders.

• Routes

A route is a set of tasks that members of a workspace complete to accomplish a business activity. Routes can contain any item added to the workspace's folders, including documents and non-document items such as RFQs and quotations. Or a route can have no content. For example, a workspace member might create a route to get a design specification reviewed and approved. The person can include the design specification and other related documentation in the route. Some workspace members would have tasks for reviewing and commenting on the spec, others would have tasks for approving the spec.

To speed-up the process of creating a route, you can save routes that you use frequently as templates. A route template contains the commonly reused components of a route, such as the description, route members, instructions, and task actions.

For information about using routes, see the Common Components User Guide.

• Web meetings

Workspace members can schedule, join, and manage Web meetings. A Web meeting lets you conference with other people--live and over the Internet. Meeting attendees can share and mark up documents, give presentations, lead Web tours, demo applications, and share Desktops.

• Subscriptions

Subscribing means to indicate that you want to be notified whenever a specific event is performed for a workspace or workspace component. For example, you could request that you be notified whenever someone locks a file for editing or checks in a new version of the file. You can also have other people be notified when specific events occur for components that you own. This is called pushing a subscription.