Workspaces gives you a shared, 'middle' space to collaborate on data with one of your suppliers or customers. Instead of sending data back and forth, you and your collaborator work on the same documents in a space that sits between both organizations — letting you verify, enrich, and align data before you pull it into your own organization.
This guide will take you through how to create a workspace, invite a collaborator, and work with documents, tasks, and data inside it.
Accessing Workspaces
From the front page of Prduct, in the left-hand menu, go to Collaboration → Workspaces.
In the Workspaces overview you can:
Create a new workspace
See your Active workspaces
See your Pending workspaces — those you have invited a collaborator to, or those you have been invited to yourself
Creating a Workspace
Click Create Workspace to start. Creating a workspace happens in three steps.
Step 1 – Set up the workspace
Workspace name: Enter a name for the workspace.
Collaborator: Select the collaborator to invite — one of your suppliers or customers that you intend to share data with.
Document type: Select the driving document type for the workspace. If you are sharing products, select Products; if you are sharing components, select Components, and so on.
Data model(s): Select the driving data model. You can select more than one.
Step 2 – Add documents
Add the documents you want to work on. You can see whether each document is already linked to your chosen collaborator.
You can also select documents that isnt linked to a supplier, or linked to another supplier.
Step 3 – Send the invite
Click Create and Send to send the workspace invite to your chosen collaborator. You can include an optional message to them.
Workspace Overview
Once your workspace is created, click it to open the overview. At the top you will find three tabs:
Documents – all the documents in the workspace
Tasks – tasks for steering the collaboration
Audit logs – a log of everything that happens in the workspace
The Documents Tab
The Documents tab shows all documents in your workspace.
Adding documents
Click the blue Add button to:
Add fresh, empty documents, or
Include existing documents from your organization
Import and export
At the top of the section you will also find two buttons:
Import CSV: Bulk import documents, or update existing ones via import. This follows the same logic as the import functionality elsewhere in the system (products, components, etc.).
Export: Export all your products, or only the selected ones, to an Excel file with all corresponding data attributes. This also follows the same logic as export elsewhere in the system.
Note: When updating via import, you will first need to make an export of the existing documents in the workspace - That export will include a workspace ID. This ID is needed to dictate the relation to which documents to update on.
Mass actions
When you select/mark one or more documents, an Actions button appears. From here you can:
Attach data models to all or selected products.
Add supplementary attributes — standalone attributes that are not already included in the selected data models.
Copy to organization — especially relevant if you are the customer and your supplier is sharing products you don't yet have. You can have them upload or create products in the workspace, work on the data together in this shared space, and verify it before pulling it into your own organization.
Remove products from the workspace.
Note: Only the workspace owner can remove products or delete the workspace.
The Tasks Tab
On the Tasks tab you can create tasks for a colleague, yourself, or your collaborator. For example, a task could be to verify the country of origin on all products, confirm the correct weights, or update certificates. Tasks are a way to steer the collaboration.
The Audit Logs Tab
The Audit logs tab shows everything that has happened in the workspace — changed data and attributes, tasks, and more. It is essentially a log of all activity in the workspace.
Working with a Single Document
When you click a document, the right-hand bar fills with data on that document, giving you the document overview. You can fold out this section for more space using the arrow at the top, to the left of the document name.
A single document has four tabs:
Data
Sync
Workflow
Tiers
Data:
See all attributes based on the selected data models, as well as supplementary data attributes. You can also add supplementary data attributes here.
Sync (Synchronization):
Connect the document with an existing document in your own organization. Once connected, you can map the attributes to match the existing document's attributes, and synchronize data in either direction:
From your organization into the workspace, or
From the workspace into your organization
Note: If you and your collaborator change data on a document, the change will not appear in your own organization until you choose to synchronize it into your own document.
Workflow:
Set up workflows for how to work with the documents — for example, providing weight data, providing the necessary certificates, or verifying certificate expiry dates.
From here desired workflows can be configurated to steer the data collaboration.
Tiers (Supplier Tiers):
Invite a tier collaborator into the workspace. This is especially relevant for the supplier / data-providing party, who can invite one of their own suppliers — the next tier in the workspace owner's supply chain — to provide specific data fields. This cuts out steps in the information flow.
For example, if your supplier is unsure about the country of origin, they can invite their supplier to fill out only the country of origin on the relevant documents.
From the workspace owner's perspective: You cannot see who the tier provider was. In the logs it still appears as if the supplier provided the data.
From the supplier's perspective: They can see which of the tier suppliers they invited supplied what data.