What is a Document Workspace?

If you've spend some time with a Team Site then working with the next kind of SharePoint site should be no problem whatsoever. We are now looking at what's called a Document Workspace. This is another very, very common SharePoint site. And it really doesn't look all that different. Yeah, we don't have that stocked image, for example. It looks like our page is a bit more straightforward in terms of layout. But we still have the Ribbon. We still have the Quick Launch Bar. We still have the Options up at the top with our name and the search box.

And in fact what I am looking at here is a Document Workspace that's had just a tiny little bit of use done with it. I have got an entry in the Announcements list. I've got a couple of documents that have been uploaded to the Document Library. And again, we want to make sure that when we are new to SharePoint a lot of these words that include the term document can get a little confusing. We've got Document Workspaces and Document Libraries. Well, what's the difference between a Document Workspace and a Document Library? Well, a workspace is a site.

When you hear something called a Document Workspace or a Meeting Workspace you can say a-ha, that's a kind of SharePoint site. Microsoft in their infinite wisdom just decided to call some of their sites "sites" and some of them "workspaces," but there is no technical difference inside SharePoint. You get a workspace. You've got a site. So if I look around this I can see that I've got Announcements. I have got a place for Documents. I've got a place for Tasks. I've got a place for Links. In fact, this is looking very, very similar to a team site.

In fact, if I go to my All Site Content section I can see that I've got Announcements, Calendar, Links and Tasks, the Team Discussion, Shared Documents. This almost looks identical. So what's going on? Well, I'll tell you. A Document Workspace really isn't all that different from a team site. It's just got a different kind of focus to it, kind of same way that a public website that deals in selling clothes is really not all that different from a public website that deals in selling books.

They have both got the same idea of shopping carts, of processing through it, of viewing different products, of choosing to add them. Same kind of thing. We just have a different focus here. Instead of the business problem where we have a team that needs to work together, we have a document that needs collaboration. What does that mean? Well let's say in this case we have got an annual report is due. And it's not been created by a team. It's been created by a bunch of different people in a bunch of different places and across different teams across the organization.

Marketing needs to have input, Actuarial needs to have input, Operations needs to have input, and Management needs to have input. And we want to make sure that we can track this information. Well, we can do that with a Document Workspace. This gives us a place to put some announcements, a place to put tasks such as reviewing certain documents or signing off on covers or finding logos, or in this case a recycled paper supplier. A Document Workspace allows you to track everything you need about a particular document.

But the focus is on the document, not on the team. Aside from that it's very simple. Most of the same things that we've explored with the team site work just exactly the same way here. Like a team site, a Document Workspace is one of the classic SharePoint sites available in all editions of SharePoint and a very, very common one. It doesn't mean that it necessarily fixes a business problem that you have. It might, it might not. But once again, if you're going to become familiar with SharePoint, a Document Workspace is one of those sites that really about five or ten minutes of just experimenting and playing around and clicking through, you can figure out exactly what this does.

Most Document Workspaces will need to have some customization done to them to make them more useful, more specific to the needs, but a very simple site and a very classic site inside SharePoint.