Salesforce.com Workspaces

This will be the first of a series of posts on the use of Content within Salesforce.com. I'll start with how to manually manage the Content and then how to extend the use of Content with Visualforce and Apex to remove swivel chair steps to better the user experience. The series will be focused on how to build a Field Guide for Birds and how bird-watching enthusiasts (or in my case, amateurs) can track their 'discovery' of Birds with a journal

Workspaces are a great way to organize and constrain your organization's use of the Content module within Salesforce.com. By using workspaces, your user community is better able to collaborate on the use of Content and discover (rather than duplicate) existing content. In this post, I'll go through how to set up a new Workspace, how to set up workspace permissions and how to use Guided Tagging to ensure users are best able to classify.

We're going to start with a new Workspace. Ensure that you are enabled for CRM Content before you begin this step. I had to sign up for a new trial edition of Salesforce.com because my developer edition did not have Content enabled.

First click on the Workspaces tab and click [New] to create a new Workspace



You can either Save the workspace as is or you can add users. By default, you will be added as the Workspace Administrator (with full access to the workspace) for the newly created workspace. Now create a new Workspace permission to allow users to have limited rights within the workspace. Do this by clicking through [Setup]/[Customize]/[Salesforce CRM Content]/[Workspace Permissions] and clicking the [Add a Workspace Permission] button. I like the pattern of Workspace Admin, Workspace Super User, Workspace User and Workspace Viewer to constrain permissions. By default, Salesforce gives you Admin, Author and Viewer to demonstrate the capabilities in workspace permissions.



Now that you've got a workspace and a subset of granular permissions in a Workspace Permission, set up your tagging rules. I like Guided Tagging. It allows full flexibility but also helps your users to select from suggested tags. Go to the Workspace and click [Tagging Rules] to set these up. Comma separate your guided tags.



Now add the users that you want to add to the workspace and define their permissions. Currently, there is a two-step wizard for this.

Add the user.



Define the permission to use



Next post will be on setting up Content Types, defining Custom [Lookup] fields on Content and Contributing to a shared workspace (the one we've just defined)