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.
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 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 Workspace |
Moving conversations |
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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.
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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!
2 replies
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I am revisiting the idea of using teams... we haven't been able to yet because Frontapp doesn't seem to allow us to everything we need it to yet - BUT here's a question.
Can I have one channel exist on multiple teams?
There are some channels that we have currently that cannot be "split" very easily on our end, so it'd be great if we could have them in each team. A "shared channel" example is our Facebook business page. Obviously, we have different location's pages, but the way FB is structured it still comes into the same box. We'd prefer this feature (for now) with our Aircall inbox as well...
We already know you won't allow us to have multiple email inboxes and we're thinking we could set up mail forwarding or something to combat that... but I [wonder if] being able to send it to another team directly without needing to forward the message would make more sense... -
Allie Huang you're not able to have the same channel exist across multiple teams. The reason we implemented Teams this way is based on how we think about work being done within Front. At the end of the day, having the same channel across multiple teams would result in duplicate work and efforts.
In your example for Facebook, perhaps creating a Social Media Team that multiple locations work out of would be an ideal set-up. Everyone who manages those channels will be part of this one team and can collectively manage messages that belong to their location, from the same shared inbox.
In regards to email, since each Team effectively functions as a silo, if you have one message sent to two separate teams, or you forward an email from one team to the other, the emails are 'split'. To add some additional context, what I mean by 'split' is each conversation will exist independently within each Team, therefore one team can act on their copy of the email without impacting the other team's copy. Regardless of which option you chose to move forward with, the underlying logic will still be the same.
Let me know if you have any additional questions and thank you for sharing!