2.7 Create Your Initial Workspaces

There are three types of workspaces in Novell Teaming: Global Workspaces (company-wide), Personal Workspaces (individual), and Team Workspaces (smaller teams). After a new workspace is created, every sub-workspace and subfolder inherits its access rights from the parent workspace by default. The workspace or folder administrator can deselect this inherit option for any individual sub-workspace and subfolder on the Access Control page for the individual workspace or folder.

Planning the initial content for your site is an important step to help your users learn and use the site. Without some content, users are lost. However, too much content (especially empty containers and a complex structure) might cause users to have trouble mapping to the real work they need to do. Before end users access the installation, the Global Workspace should have enough content to engage them, but not to overwhelm them. Also, a workspace hierarchy and set of dedicated applications are best developed in parallel with users using the product and providing feedback about what best serves their needs.

The best approach is to plan out a tight minimal set of content in the Global Workspace to provide the end users with a functional site that they can quickly navigate and start using.

2.7.1 Creating Teams

The team creation process can be simplified with some initial planning:

  • Although, by default, anyone can create a team (unless you edit the default access rights; see Editing Default Team Workspace Access Rights) the process is much easier if a site administrator creates group names for teams before team creation occurs.

  • Thinking through how you want to architect group names is a useful initial task.

  • Access control is greatly simplified and enhanced by utilizing well-planned group names for your site.

2.7.2 Creating an Administration Team Workspace

NOTE:You should create an Administration group first to simplify the process for editing your administration access rights. You can then add this group to the administration team and set the access rights for this group. In the future, you can add or delete users from this administration group and not worry about editing the administration team’s access rights for individual members, because they are assigned to the group. For the following procedure assume that the admin group now exists.

  1. On your Home Page, click Team Workspaces.

    Workspace tree

  2. Click Add a team workspace.

    Team workspaces

  3. Type a Workspace title for the new workspace.

    Workspace Title

  4. Select the team members. Make sure you add the admin group, which we will also use for setting access rights so that you only need to control membership to this group to control administrative access rights and administration workspace membership.

    Team members

    See the Online Help or the Novell Teaming User Guide for details on selecting users.

  5. Select all the initial Workspace folders you want to create in this workspace.

    Workspace Folders

  6. Click OK.

2.7.3 Setting the Administration Team Access Rights

  1. In the ICEcore Administration Team workspace, select the Manage > Access Control menu item.

    Manage menu

  2. In the Access Rights table, click Add a group.

    Add a group

  3. Start typing admin, then select admin from the drop-down list.

    Add a group drop-down list

  4. For the admin group, select the Workspace and folder administrator, Participant, and Team member roles.

    Group settings

  5. Click Save Changes.

  6. Click Close.

2.7.4 Using the Root Team Workspace

You can set any workspace to be a “root” team workspace, which allows anyone with the correct access rights to add workspaces under the root workspace. A root team workspace has the Add a team workspace button available to anyone with the appropriate access rights.

An administrator can set a workspace to be a root team workspace temporarily, while the sub-workspaces your company needs to set up are added, or set it to permanently be a root team workspace so that users can always create additional workspaces under the root team workspace. How you configure a specific area depends on what the workspaces are used for and how much control you want the users to have over the layout of the site.

To configure a Workspace to be a Root Team Workspace:

  1. In the ICEcore Administration Team workspace, select the Manage > Configure menu item.

    Manage menu

  2. Select the Team workspace root option, then click Apply.

    Configure defaults

    For a regular workspace, select the default Workspace view. If you want to track project tasks and milestones based on task completion, select the Project management workspace view. For a team workspace, select the Team workspace root view to display the Add a team workspace button. If your team workspace is organizational in nature and not intended to have team workspaces as its sub-workspaces, select the Team workspace view, which omits the Add a team workspace button.

  3. Click Close.

    The Add a team workspace button is now available in the ICEcore Administration Team workspace.

    ICEcore Administration Team workspace

    NOTE:Because only members (administrators) of the admin group have access to this workspace, you can make it a permanent Team workspace root, so any administrator can create sub-workspaces.