Organizing with Workspaces

We’re excited to rollout a new feature today called, workspaces!

Workspaces

The concept of workspaces originally came from a request from one of our larger metropolitan departments. They had several different users groups, including data analysts, operations/performance management, and a multi-level hierarchy of battalion, district, and station leadership users. As each user group has a different role in the organization, you might imagine the dashboards they were creating were drastically different both in structure and underlying theme. One dashboard was for station turnout times, one for end of the year reporting, one for municipality reports, one for station location analysis, and the list goes on. Managing all these dashboards, and more importantly, user access — or who can modify which dashboards — soon become problematic.

With workspaces, you can now organize your dashboards, visualizations, and saved searches into meaningful categories such as Operations, Accreditation, Battalion, or Station Dashboards. Once inside a workspace, you will only have access to the dashboards and visualizations that have been created in that workspace. When creating a workspace, you can also grant other users read/write access, or keep the workspace only visible to yourself. This allows you to have your own private playground for example, if you didn’t want to destroy the “gold” copy.

Lets get started!

Login to NFORS and click Dashboard on the left-hand menu. Instead of directly entering the dashboard arena, you will now be presented with a workspaces screen:

Note: You will notice a “default” workspace. For existing users, all your existing dashboards have been migrated to this workspace. Feel free to continue using this workspace, and start creating new workspaces when you’re ready or your use cases grow.

Creating a new workspace

1. From the workspaces landing page, click Create New
2. Fill out the general details

General Details

Name: An identifying name for the workspace

Description: A text area to describe the intention of the workspace

Color: A color can be selected to quickly identify the workspace

Create Sample Dashboards: If YES, we will load the workspace with our default or “stock” Incident and Responses Dashboards. Toggle this button, if you would like an empty workspace.

3. Assign user permissions

User Permissions

When you create a workspace, by default, it will be private. However, if you are creating a shared workspace, you will want to adjust ownership and access permissions.

To assign another user as a co-owner, click the dropdown in the Owner column on the appropriate row.

• YES will make the user a co-owner. This gives the user WRITE access to the workspace and allows the user to grant or revoke permissions, as well as delete a workspace.
• NO will remove the user as a co-owner. The user will maintain any access permissions they have.

Generally, we only recommend a limited amount of co-owners (just yourself and a backup). For other members of your workspace that are not co-owners, you’ll want to assign the appropriate permissions via the dropdown in the Access Permission column.

• READ will give the user read access to a workspace’s saved objects. This allows the user to filter, and explore dashboards and visualizations. However, the user will NOT be able to create or modify any dashboards or visualizations in this workspace.
• WRITE will give the user write access to a workspace’s saved objects. This allows the user to create, edit, and delete dashboards and visualizations.
• NONE will remove the user’s access to the workspace. No saved objects will be deleted.

4. Click Create

New Accreditation Workspace

5. Enter your new workspace by clicking the new card shown.

Editing a workspace

Owners can edit user permissions and general workspace details at anytime, via the dropdown in the right hand corner of the workspace card.

Deleting a workspace

Owners can delete a workspace, via the dropdown in the right hand corner of the workspace card. WARNING: this will delete all the saved objects in the workspace!

Copy data between workspaces

Say you’ve got some sweet looking visualizations you want copied over to a new workspace. No problem! We got you covered. You’ll need to export all the objects from your old workspace and import them to your new workspace.

Exporting Objects

Exporting Objects

1. Enter the “old” workspace, or the workspace that you would like to copy the objects from.
2. Click the Management Tab
3. Click the Saved Objects Option
4. Click the checkbox to select all objects, or selectively select the subset of objects you would like to migrate over
5. Click Export and Confirm
6. A .json file should be downloaded to you computer

Importing Objects

Importing Objects

1. Enter the “new” workspace, or the workspace that you would like to copy the objects into to.
2. Click the Management Tab
3. Click the Saved Objects Option
4. Click Import, and select the .json file generated in the export
5. Patiently wait a few moments!
6. Once complete, press Done

We hope you enjoy the new workspaces feature! Stay tuned for an exciting new feature we are working on to selectively pre-populate workspaces with even more “stock” dashboards including accreditation tables, station location analysis, station turnout dashboards, and more.