Content Segregation with SAP Analytics Cloud Workspaces

Whether it be stories, analytic applications, or datasets, SAP Analytics Cloud content creators are constantly creating and editing business content. Over time, organizations with many users using SAP Analytics Cloud often encounter the issue of having enormous amounts of content created by multiple departments within their organization such as HR, business, marketing teams, and more. While having too much content may not seem like a major issue at a first glance, as more and more content is created and stored within SAP Analytics Cloud over time, it can become increasingly difficult for creators to find, edit, and control the content that is relevant to their department. Furthermore, with many current tenant setups, most content is accessible to all departments, and thus, it can become difficult to organize files and to find relevant files, which could take some time in a large deployment. Fortunately, we’re happy to announce that with the latest release of SAP Analytics Cloud (2021 QRC4), a solution now exists to solve this problem.

Workspaces Overview

So, what exactly is Workspaces? Workspaces are virtual workspaces that SAP Analytics Cloud admins can set up to mimic their departments, LOBs, regional structure set-up, or any organizational set-up for that matter. With Workspaces, admins can now partition their existing file repo into chunks and delegate content administration. By doing so, content can be segregated depending on the content creator’s business department, and access can be restricted for content that is not intended for mass sharing (such as important financial or HR data).

After Workspaces are set up by SAP Analytics Cloud administrators, from a content creator’s perspective, Finance (or any other department/group) can now essentially have their own file repository where they can store data that is inaccessible to users from another department and vice versa. In summary, Workspaces enables customers to better manage content, by limiting access and sharing of content to only users within the workspace.

SAP Analytics Cloud Workspaces

Workspaces Features

In the previous section, I provided a general overview of what Workspaces is. In the section below, I’ll outline the various features of Workspaces and how the feature will affect an end-user.

Workspaces works with the existing file repository so both can co-exist

The new feature does not replace the existing file repository and works with the current file repository. Thus, current content stored within the existing file repository can be segregated according to an administrator or an organization’s needs.

Files with SAP Analytics Cloud Workspaces

Optional to set-up for customers

Customers can disable or enable workspaces depending on their needs. For example, an organization with fewer SAP Analytics Cloud users may decide not to use Workspaces as it may be unnecessary to segregate your business content.

Leverages SAP Analytics Cloud Teams for workspace Assignment

Additional work is not required, as administrators can use existing SAP Analytics Cloud teams to assign workspaces. SAP Analytics Cloud teams can contain multiple users, and a user can belong to multiple teams, meaning that a single user could have access to multiple workspaces if desired.

Selecting teams for a specific workspace

Restricts the sharing boundary of content

Administrators can set up separate workspaces, ensuring that files can only be accessed by end-users of a specific SAP Analytics Cloud team or group. Thus, from a content-creators perspective, when a new piece of content is created, it can only be shared with other users within the workspace (as content within a workspace cannot be shared with non-assigned users).

Workspaces Management Module

Workspaces Demo

In the video below, you can view the Workspaces feature in action, see how an admin can setup various workspaces within SAP Analytics Cloud, and view a demo of the feature from a content creator’s perspective.

As seen in the demo above, the Workspaces module can be easily accessed from the SAP Analytics Cloud homepage, using the sidebar on the left.

Accessing Workspaces

Within the module, an administrator can add a new workspace, delete an unneeded one, and/or manage all the workspaces within a tenant. In the demo, four workspaces have been created for multiple departments: business, development, human resources, and management.

Workspaces Management module

Within a specific workspace, an admin can customize a workspace’s general settings, add/remove teams, and assign workspace administrators to manage the workspace content.

Workspace Creation Page

Finally, from a content creator’s perspective, they will not have access to the workspace management tab on the left sidebar (which is reserved for administrators). Instead, content creators will be able to access the specific workspace they are assigned to by navigating to the files tab.

Workspaces from a content creator’s perspective

What Workspaces is not?

Workspaces addresses the issues of needing to organize files/folders in tenants with large deployments, restricting access to content, and content administration within partitioned groups. However, it’s also important to understand what Workspaces is NOT meant to be used for:

• A way to allow tenants to be isolated into sub-tenants
• A way to isolate anything other than content
• A way to isolate user populations
• A way to allocate resources

In Conclusion

From this blog post, we overviewed the basics of Workspaces – releasing in QRC4, learned its various features, viewed a video demo of the feature in action, and learned about what Workspaces is not. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments below!