Workspaces

A Workspace is an isolated administrative boundary within a Files.com Site for a single team, department, business unit, or project. Each Workspace contains its own scoped set of resources, including Users, Files, Integrations, Automations, and Partners, all fully isolated from the rest of the site and from other Workspaces.

As an organization scales on Files.com, the volume of users, permission changes, automations, remote servers, and partner onboarding requests outgrows what a central administrative layer can absorb, and resources from different teams tangle together. A Workspace gives a team its own administrator and its own resource boundary while keeping site-wide governance centralized.

Site Administrators create Workspaces and designate one or more Workspace Administrators to run them. The Workspace Administrator handles their team's day-to-day operations on a self-service basis: onboarding users, managing partners, configuring automations, and setting up Remote Servers. They do not need to involve the Site Administrator, and they cannot see or affect any other Workspace.

Security policy, SSO, audit logs, IP addresses, domains, branding, and billing are configured site-wide and apply to every Workspace.

Organizations create and manage Workspaces through the Web App, CLI, SDK & APIs, and Terraform. There is no cap on the number of Workspaces a Site can have.

Customers use Workspaces to delegate administration to business units, departments, or regional teams, simplify complex permission models, isolate partner relationships and client engagements, run confidential projects and M&A diligence, stand up new divisions or acquisitions, and run agentic workflows or testing environments. See Workspace Use Cases for examples of each.

Comparing Workspaces to Related Features

For most organizations, Workspaces provide a more complete delegation model than the alternatives below. For detailed guidance on choosing between these features, see Child Sites, Workspaces, Partners, and Admin Permissions: When To Choose Each.

Workspaces vs. Child Sites

Child Sites provide full site-level isolation with separate Site Administrators, authentication configurations, IP addresses, custom domains, and branding. Choose Child Sites when you need data residency requirements (for example, EU data must stay in an EU region), regulatory compliance boundaries that require separate governance, different security policies, or environment separation (production, staging, development).

Workspaces provide operational isolation within a shared site infrastructure. Choose Workspaces when teams need independent administration but share the same security policies, domain, and branding. Both can be used together. Child Sites handle hard separation. Workspaces handle internal delegation within each site.

Workspaces vs. Partners

Partners represent external organizations, including clients, vendors, and suppliers. Partners exist within a Workspace, which allows Workspace Administrators to manage their own external relationships. Workspaces organize internal operations, while Partners organize external relationships.

Workspaces vs. Site Administrators

Site Administrators have full access to everything on the site, including all Workspaces, site-wide settings, billing, security, and authentication. Making someone a Site Administrator to manage a single department or business unit grants them access far beyond what they need. Workspaces solve this by giving that person full operational control within a defined boundary. A Workspace Administrator manages their own users, partners, automations, and integrations without seeing or affecting anything else on the site.

Workspaces vs. Folder Admins

Folder Admins manage folders and folder settings for a specific folder. They cannot manage users, groups, remote servers, or partner relationships. Folder Admins are a tactical permission tool, not an organizational layer. Use Folder Admins within a Workspace to give someone limited control over a specific folder without full Workspace administration.

Workspaces vs. Group Admins

Group Admins manage users inside a single group. Site Administrators decide site-wide which user-management capabilities Group Admins can use, drawn from creating users, editing user details, enabling or disabling accounts, deleting users, setting and resetting passwords, and exempting individual users from User Lifecycle Rules. Group Admins cannot manage folders, remote servers, automations, or partners. Use a Group Admin to delegate user management within one group; use a Workspace Administrator when delegation has to span users, folders, automations, partners, and integrations together.