This page describes best practices, tips, and common use cases for working with team workspaces. The information on this page will help you create and use team workspaces efficiently and confidently and share content only as necessary. This page also provides examples of common naming conventions and scenarios.

In this article:

Create team workspaces with a specific purpose or focus

Create and organize your team workspaces with a specific focus or purpose in mind. This can help you achieve the following:

• Keep team workspaces organized and efficient to maintain.
• Help users more quickly and conveniently access the information they need.

For example, you could implement the following structure to keep your team workspaces organized and efficient:

• One team workspace for each cross-functional project that contains shared assets
• Separate team workspaces for each team or geography, like marketing in APAC, that contain each team's specific assets
• Separate team workspace for reporting environments, like development, staging, or production reports

For more specific guidance, see the examples in Common use cases for team workspaces.

Manage membership with Google Groups

Google Groups can help you manage team workspace membership more easily by automatically granting group members access to the team workspaces that the group has access to. This approach has two main advantages:

• New group members have the same access to reports and data sources as do existing group members.
• You don't have to manually configure access for each new member.

Share content selectively

The following tips can help you share the content within team workspaces intentionally.

• Give only the necessary permissions to each user.

  When you add people or groups to a team workspace, those people will be able to create, add, and view assets within that team workspace. For people who need to also be able to add and remove team workspace members, give them the Content manager or Manager role as needed.

• Share individual assets for limited access.

  If someone needs access to only a certain report or data source within a team workspace, you can share only that asset rather than making them a member of the team workspace.

See Roles and permissions for more information about the different team workspace roles in Looker Studio.

Use naming conventions

To help people find team workspaces and to avoid naming conflicts in team workspaces, agree on organization-wide naming conventions. For example:

• Your company has sales divisions in different regions and you create a team workspace for each sales region. To differentiate the team workspaces, prefix them with the region or an abbreviation of the region.
• You can indicate status by adding a prefix, such as [Archive], to a project that's no longer active or [In Progress] to a project that's active.
• To distinguish between team workspaces that are shared externally and those that are shared internally, add the prefix [External] or [Internal].
• Use labels to indicate the team workspace's purpose, such as [Pre-prod] for a team workspace that contains pre-production assets and [Prod] for a team workspace that contains production assets. Labels can help team members understand the purpose of the workspace and what type of assets each team workspace contains.

Common use cases for team workspaces

This section includes some examples of how to use the principles outlined in this article to make effective and efficient use of team workspaces.

Example: Functional team collaboration

Suppose you want all members of a Marketing team to have a shared space where they can create and access marketing content like reports and data sources. To create this collaborative space for the team, follow these steps:

1. Create a team workspace that is dedicated to the Marketing team's assets.
2. Add the members of the Marketing team to that team workspace.
3. Provide the team members with the Contributor role for the team workspace. This access will allow them to add new content and update existing assets within the team workspace.
4. Provide leads and others who need to be able to add or remove team workspace members with the Content manager role.

Example: Production environments

In this example, suppose you have a central data team that creates content to be shared with the entire company.

To allow the team to control how their content is shared during the development process and when it's ready for production, follow these steps:

1. Create a team workspace with a title like "Dev” or "Pre-prod” for content that is being developed. Pre-production content developed by a central data team can be stored in this workspace.
2. Once the content is ready to be shared, people with the Manager role in the team workspace can move it to a production workspace. This workspace can have a title like "Prod” or "Production-specific.”

Example: Time-bound project

Suppose you are working on an ad campaign for a specific client, and you want to manage all client-related content in a single place.

To do this, follow these steps:

1. Create a team workspace dedicated to the client's ad campaign.
2. As needed, add people who are part of the immediate project team as members of the team workspace with the Contributor role.
3. Assign the Contributor role to members who need to be able to contribute to the project but who don't need to be able to manage member access.

This will ensure that all relevant information is in one place and that only those who need to see it have access. You can assign the Content manager role or the Manager role as needed to people who need to be able to manage access, such as the team lead.

Example: Standard templates

Suppose your company has published reports and metrics for different analyses, like customer support reports, marketing campaign reports, company-wide OKR reports, and project updates.

You can create templates that users can copy and customize to make it easier for people to build their own customized reports. To create a team workspace that is dedicated to standard templates, follow these steps:

1. Create a team workspace dedicated to the standard templates.
2. Move the key reports, published reports, or data sources into this workspace.
3. Add the key people who are responsible for updating and maintaining the templates as Content managers.
4. Add a company-wide Google Group as a viewer on the reports. This allows everyone in the company can view these reports without modifying the template, and to leverage the templates for their customization.

This will ensure everyone has access to the templates and that they don't make any accidental changes.

Related resources

• About team workspaces
• Create, edit, and delete team workspaces