Workspaces

Last updated: September 3, 2024

What is a workspace

A workspace is a separate graph in Tana, where you can control who has access, you can create tags for that particular workspace and you can control which, if any, tags from other workspaces you want to allow.

Each workspace has its own library and you can export a JSON structure of the entire workspace.

Setting up a workspace

If you look in your sidebar you can see your private workspace at the top. This is your personal workspace, and it cannot be shared with anyone else. Anything you put in here, must explicitly be shared with other workspaces, so you can be sure that data from this workspace won't be seen by others.

In the bottom of the sidebar, you will find a plus-sign where you can accept invites to workspaces created by others, or you can create your own workspaces. Workspaces you create or accept invites from will be shown beneath you private space.

Let's go ahead and create a workspace to share with your team:

• Click create workspace, and give it a name
• After it's done, you can click the Members options to invite other users to your workspace. Users must have an existing Tana account.
• Once they accept, you'll be able to collaborate in that space.

Working with multiple workspaces

Schema

To work with multiple workspaces, it's best to create supertags in the workspace where you want the shared data to live. You can still use the tags in other workspaces, but if you create a tag in your personal workspace and use it in a shared workspace, only you will see that tag. Similarly if you link a node from your workspace without moving it over, the title of the node will show, but only you will be able to expand and see the content of the node.

Membership

The workspace membership is the security boundary for whether content is visible to users or not. Whether a user can see a node depends on 1. where the node lives, and 2. if the user is a member of that workspace. Anything that lives inside your private workspace can never be referenced to anyone else.

Move to command

Whenever you want a node in your private workspace to be seen by members of another shared workspace, you have to move the node to the workspace with the "Move to" command, or press Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+M.

Moving something to another workspace changes the ownership of the node from being under your private workspace to being owned by the shared workspace. By default you have the option to move node to the target workspace Home node, Today or Library. But if you open the shared workspace and click settings, you can create other move targets by either copying or pasting the nodes you want as targets or by @-mentioning them

Create daily notes

Workspaces come without the default daily notes. You can create them by using the command Set up calendar for workspace

Workspace settings

Each workspace has settings of their own. You can access the settings in the following ways:

• Workspace node options (three-dotted button to the top-right) > Open settings
• The command Open settings from within the workspace in question

Deleting a workspace

Your private workspace: You are not able to delete your main private workspace. You can, however, swap your old private workspace with a new one, and then you can delete it like a regular workspace.

Other/shared workspaces: You can delete a workspace by being the last person to leave it. It becomes completely unavailable, nobody has access to the encrypted data and it is queued for deletion.

Home node

The Home node is the root node to all other nodes that exist in a Workspace.

The workspace at the top of the sidebar is your private workspace, which no one but you can see the contents of. Clicking your personal workspace will send you to your home, which acts like the base of your platform.

Workspace profile: This defaults to the initials of the Workspace name. You can replace it with an image by clicking it and uploading a new picture.

Schema: The place where all supertag definitions are saved when creating them. Field definitions can also be saved to Schema if you choose - via the field configuration panel.

Library: Created items that don't live in a specific context.

Settings: The personal preferences to your account/workspace, such as your custom keyboard shortcuts.

Options > Allow content from... controls which adjacent workspaces can populate the results of search nodes and autocomplete actions like @-mentions within a particular workspace context. This setting can be custom set from all workspaces. Examples:

• You can set it so all content from every workspace you're a member of is available to you from within your private workspace by allowing content from everything there.
• You can keep Workspace A completely isolated from retrieving anything from other workspaces you're a member of by unchecking everything there, while allowing Workspace B to find things from Workspace A still.