When to use workspaces

Overview

Workspaces are a way to divide up your inboxes into separate spaces with their own workflows, analytics and resources such as tags or message templates. For example, you could create separate workspaces for customer operations and for contract brokering.

Teammates can be given access to one or more workspaces, which, depending on their level of access, gives them permission to access its inboxes as well as create rules and resources inside the workspace. Company settings apply across workspaces, including billing, SSO and integrations. Take this course in Front Academy to learn more.

Check out this article when you're ready to create a new workspace.

When to use workspaces

Customize workspace access based on role

When you give a teammate access to a workspace, you can define which role they have inside that workspace. This means that you can specify their permissions for conversations, rules, and resource management (such as tags and message templates) across the inboxes in that workspace. In particular, you can make a teammate an admin of a workspace, giving them autonomy to manage the inboxes in that workspace while restricting them from editing other inboxes or company settings.

Manage contact information across workspaces

When a contact is auto-created from a conversation in a particular workspace, the auto-created contact will only be visible to teammates with access to that workspace. Contact lists and notes added to Contacts can be made visible only to teammates with access to the workspace.

However, contact data such as custom fields will be shared between workspaces if they both have conversations with the same contact. Furthermore, accounts as well as any contacts associated to an account will be visible to all teammates. For these reasons, workspaces do not provide contact data silos.

When you don’t need workspaces

While workspaces provide a way to divide up inboxes into multiple spaces, please note that it is possible to scope many functions of Front to specific inboxes without creating workspaces:

Inbox access - By making a shared inbox non-public, you can specify which users should have access to it.
Making resources available in certain inboxes - Tags and message templates can be made visible for only certain inboxes.
Creating rules for certain inboxes - You can add a rule condition that scopes the rule to certain inboxes.
Business hours - You can add Business Hours to a specific inbox or to the whole company/workspace.
Filter analytics - Filters in analytics allow you to scope data to certain inboxes. These filters can then be saved as analytics views.

How can teammates collaborate across workspaces?

If a teammate does not have access to a workspace, they can still be @mentioned, invited, or assigned a conversation inside that workspace. This means that if teammate A has access to workspace Z, and teammate B does not, then teammate A can still @mention teammate B into a conversation in workspace Z.

When a user does not have access to a workspace, they can:

Comment, @mention, assign, and share drafts in conversations they participate in
Archive, snooze, or delete the conversation in the shared inbox if they are the assignee
Reply from their individual email channel
View shared tags applied to the conversation
Be tracked in team analytics

When a user does not have access to a workspace, they cannot:

Reply from the shared channel
Reply to non-email conversations
Add or remove shared tags
Access shared message templates
Access shared signatures

One workspace vs. multiple workspaces

In certain scenarios, working in an environment with multiple workspaces is different from working in an environment with one workspace. Consider the differences below when building your workflows in a multi-workspace environment.

Actions	One workspace	Multiple workspaces
Moving conversations	You can manually move any shared inbox conversation to any other shared inbox, even if you do not have access to the destination inbox. To do this, ensure the Allow conversations to be moved to all inboxes company setting is active. When creating shared rules to move conversations, company admins will see all inboxes that exist in the workspace in the rule’s inbox conditions and "Move to" rule action. When creating shared rules to move conversations, workspace admins will see all inboxes that exist in the workspace in the rule’s inbox conditions, but will only see inboxes they have access to in the Move to rule action. When moving conversations with tags from one shared inbox to another, the tags will remain on the conversations.	You can manually move any shared inbox conversation to another workspace's inbox, even if you do not have access to the destination inbox. To do this, ensure the Allow conversations to be moved to all inboxes company setting is active. When creating shared rules to move conversations, company admins will see inboxes that belong to the specific workspace in the rule’s inbox conditions, but will see inboxes from all company workspaces in the “Move to” rule action. When creating shared rules to move conversations, workspace admins will see inboxes that belong to the workspace in the rule’s inbox conditions, but will only see inboxes they have access to in the “Move to” rule action. To allow workspace admins to move conversations to any shared inbox using rules, you can activate the Allow conversations to be moved to all inboxes feature in your company settings. When moving conversations with tags from one workspace to another, shared tags from the initial workspace will be removed in transit to the destination workspace. When moving conversations from one workspace to another, you will always be able to reply with the original channel if you have access to both the original inbox in the old workspace and the destination inbox in the new workspace. If you do not have access to the original inbox, but have access to the new inbox, then you may or may not be able to reply using the original channel, depending on if the original channel setting All teammates can reply is active.
Replying from a conversation’s original channel	If you have access to a shared inbox, you will be able to reply from the channel. If you do not have access to it, you may still have the ability to reply if All teammates can reply is enabled.	If you have access to both the original inbox in the old workspace and the destination inbox in the new workspace after a conversation moves, then you will always be able to reply with the original channel. If you do not have access to the original inbox, but have access to the new inbox, then you may or may not be able to reply using the original channel, depending on if the original channel has the All teammates can reply setting enabled.
Conversations merging	Emails addressed to multiple shared inbox addresses will be automatically merged into one master copy to reduce the amount of work your team has to do, unless you use the setting to Keep actions separate between shared inboxes.	Emails addressed to multiple shared inboxes from different workspaces will not merge automatically into one shared master copy.
Load balancing	Each workspace's load balance limit is 100 conversations total.	If a user is a member of multiple workspaces, their load balance limits are specific to each workspace. The maximum limit for each teammate per workspace is 100, so a teammate who is part of multiple workspaces could potentially have more than 100 load-balanced assignments. Use load balancing rules to automatically balance your team’s workload.
Analytics	All analytics are from one workspace.	Conversation moves between workspaces When you move a conversation from workspace A to workspace B, analytics are computed for the time that they were in a certain workspace. In other words, all analytics are computed for workspace A while the conversation is in workspace A; and after the move to workspace B, all analytics are computed for workspace B. All tags from workspace A will be removed from the conversation along with the move. Both the move and untag events will be associated with the workspace B analytics. To see tag analytics inclusive of these moved conversations in workspace A, you can use the Tagged anytime tag filter setting. Inbox moves between workspaces: When an inbox gets moved to a new workspace, all of the historical data for the inbox will be reindexed for the new workspace. If you need to see analytics on the past data before the move, you would check in the new workspace. Report type: Depending on your report type selection, the report will be created for the specific workspace selected or for the whole Company. The Company type return data after September 2021. For analytics before then, use the Inbox filter within individual workspaces instead.

Pricing

This feature is available on the Scale plan or above. Some legacy plans with different names may also have this feature.

Need a consultation on whether workspaces is right for you? Contact us and we're happy to help out!