All of the teams that choose Azendoo to organise and manage their work need to go through the same stage: structuring their Azendoo environment.
This article aims to help new Azendoo users structure their environment to get the most out of the platform and change the way they work for the better.
Azendoo’s structure
Azendoo’s structure is composed of three elements: Subscriptions, Workspaces, and Subjects.
- Subscriptions regroups Workspaces within the same company.
- Workspaces regroups team members and Subjects (work topics).
- Subjects gather team members around a specific topic or project to discuss, share documents and organise their work.
Subjects are what make Azendoo so flexible. They are a mix between a tag and a folder, and include task lists, discussions, documents, a calendar, and their own set of analytics.
Administration & rights
There are administrative rights to consider when setting up your Azendoo environment. Each subscription has at least one Manager, each Workspace has at least one Administrator and Subjects can have Officers.
Subscription managers are responsible for handling payment and billing of the subscription. They have the ability to remove members throughout the subscription and are the only ones who can create new Workspaces in a Subscription.
Workspace Administrators can also manage members but at the workspace level. Additionally they can allow or forbid members to invite new members to the workspace (and therefore to the subscription) and have control over the public invitation link. They also have the same rights as do Officers when it comes to managing subjects.
Subject Officers can change the Subject’s name, description, colour and confidentiality. They can also manage members at the Subject level, as well as archive or delete the subject.
Each person that creates the subscription, workspace and/or subject automatically obtains the admin rights that go with it. They can then nominate other members to have similar rights, as well as revoke those rights.
Visibility and Privacy
Only Subscription Managers can see all the Workspaces in the Subscription. All other members will only see the Workspaces they are part of.
Workspaces are completely private to other members of the subscription. If the member is not in the workspace members list, they won’t be able to access Workspace information.
Subject privacy depends on the subject type. There are three subjects types, each with their own privacy settings:
- Dynamic subjects always include all Workspace members, new members join automatically and everyone sees the activity in their feed.
- Open subjects are opened to all Workspace members, they don’t need to be member of the subject to see and interact with its content.
- Closed subjects can be found by all Workspace members, but its content is only accessible to subject members. Those who are not subject members can ask to join.
- Secret subjects cannot be found by Workspace members, and are accessible only upon invitation. Only their members have access to the content and it cannot be shared to other subjects simultaneously.
How to get organized around Subjects
Subjects can be used to organise your team’s work and discussions on any topic, whether they are temporary, such as an event, or permanent, like your marketing efforts. Subjects are also a way to create smaller teams within your Workspace team members, or a way to create a new list of tasks.
You could, for example, organize your Azendoo environment with one Subject for each team or department in your company. Then you can make a list of all your ongoing and future projects and create subjects for those.
You can also invite your partners, clients, and any other external collaborators as Guests, in dedicated subjects, in order to collaborate closely together.
The strength of Azendoo resides in the fact that any content (tasks, messages, documents) can be shared to multiple subjects simultaneously, reaching a wider or smaller audience as necessary.
Once a Subject built for a temporary usage is no longer relevant, archive it. An archived subject is no longer listed in the Subject list, but all content is still available through search, and can be un-archived. This is useful to keep the number of subjects from becoming excessive.
Subjects can be created with specific purposes in mind, such as organising a list of tasks, discussing a topic with a few teammates, managing a calendar, create a document repository, sharing content with the team, and many other use cases including mixing any of these uses. Here are 20 examples of what your Subjects could be.
How many Workspaces should we use ?
The question to use one or multiple workspaces to organise your team is a legitimate one. The answer is almost always to use only one workspace for your team, but there are exceptions.
Grouping all of your team members in a single Workspace is a good choice because Workspaces are closed entities. Some of the benefits include:
- Enabling cross-departmental communication and collaboration
- Finding information even faster and easier
- Team task lists are more informative
- Everyone can have a better idea of their coworkers workload
- Team members can send Direct Message to each other
- The team calendar is richer because it includes all members’ tasks
- Increased transparency and flexibility
These benefits become de facto limitations that your team will face if using multiple Workspaces.
Using multiple Workspaces would be a good option in the case where you have different teams that are very restricted and that do not collaborate, or that require a high level of confidentiality. In this case, splitting teams into different Workspaces can limit sharing and confidentiality mistakes by your team members.
Ultimately you are going to decide whether to use one or multiple Workspaces based on this information and your own experience.
Test and learn
The best advice I can give you to help get organised with your team is to try different setups and see what works best for you. Also read some of our user stories, where you can get tips on how to get organised. And of course you can always reach out to our customer support to ask for help or guidance :)
I hope you found this article helpful and look forward to reading your thoughts and questions in the comment section below.