Executive Summary
Digital solutions can be complex to understand, with new features, functions and related terminology which needs to be understood to be used properly. One area of understanding which sometimes needs to be explained further is the concept of a Page, and how a Page is different to a Workspace.
This article will seek to explain what a page is, what a workspace is, as well as the difference between them.
Introduction
Think of a computer. Think about a digital file. Think about your day-to-day work in our modern digital world.
Unlike a physical object such as a book or a cup of tea, which can be picked up and felt and moved and placed wherever you want, digital things do not exist in our physical world. You cannot pick up a website, you cannot hold an email file, you cannot place your apps on a shelf or in a cupboard.
What does this mean? It means that digital items need to be stored somewhere because they only exist in the computers themselves. They do not exist outside the computers (in our physical world). They must live inside a hard drive of some kind (e.g. network drive, personal computer drive, or Cloud storage). Sure, you can print out a file, but it then stops being a file and becomes paper. Technically speaking, you cannot print out a file.
But again, what does this mean? It means that architecturally your digital items need to reside within an area which can be accessed so the files can be viewed, managed, shared, etc.
The Atlas architecture is built within the SharePoint Online framework, and therefore like with any digital solution, an area to create, store and manage content is needed. You HAVE to upload a file to somewhere - it can't be floating around without being housed inside an area of some kind.
These areas where you upload files are called workspaces (sometimes referred to as sites).
Analogy: SharePoint Online is a retail park / shopping mall with lots of space for retailers to set-up new shops.
Your organization's Atlas platform is used to organize the retail park. The retail park is divided into blocks which retailers can select to set-up their shops.
Initially the retail park is empty. There are no shops, and no items in any shops.
Now imagine that someone decides to set-up a new shop in the retail park. The first thing they do is to reserve the location and name the block where they are setting up the shop.
In a SharePoint world, the new shop is the new SharePoint site, the location is the site URL and the name is the unique name of that site in the URL.
Many more shop owners do the same, and there are now 100s of reserved blocks for shops.
Or in the SharePoint world, there are now 100s of sites, each with their own URL and name.
But, the retail park is still empty - there's nothing in any of the shops yet - they are just empty shells. And in SharePoint, the sites are just empty sites.
Each shop owner now starts getting their shop ready for business, just like a SharePoint site owner would need to get their site ready.
How does this compare:
| Shop owners | SharePoint site owners |
| Add signage | The site's title |
| Dress up their shop windows: | The home page of the site |
| Add shelves, racks and storage room: | the workspace lists and libraries |
| Start stocking up of their wares: | Adding items, documents and pages to lists and libraries |
| Create nice looking displays of their wares: | Create additional pages within the site to add content or to aggregate/display items from various lists and libraries. |
What is an Atlas Workspace?
An Atlas Workspace, or simply a workspace, is a SharePoint site (with or without a Microsoft Team), which includes a range of specialized Atlas components, lists, features, pages and configuration.
As explained above, a workspace (or a site) is it’s own container which provides the ability to govern, manage and organize content.
What is Content?
Technically, a site or a workspace is not content, but within these workspaces you can create or upload content - which are digital items.
Content might be a document, a page, a link, or an event - to name just a few. These pieces of content will have their own content type depending on what you want to create.
Just like an email - you can't have an email land in your inbox without it being an email file type (.msg).
In the same way, word documents have the file type DOCX (or DOC) and adobe acrobat documents have PDF as their filetype.
Pages is another way of creating content.
What is a page?
A page is a key type of content. It is a digital file (.aspx) and as such, a page has to be created and stored within a particular workspace.
Pages are essentially flat documents with their own URL which presents information to a user. Similar to a document, it displays information. But unlike a document, you cannot move it and you cannot download it. It is fixed in it's position via it's URL.
Importantly, you cannot upload a document or any digital file to a page. A page is just a way to present information, it is not used for storage. It is a digital file, not a method of storage for other digital files. To store digital files, as the previous section stated, you need to use a workspace. So a piece of content can be shown to a user on a page, but that piece of content is stored in the relevant workspace list or library.
It is similar to a website. If you go to ClearPeople.com, this is the main landing page of the website. The website domain is ClearPeople.com, but the page you are looking at (home) still has information to show.
If you go to the nike.com website, there is a home landing page which displays the newest, most important or most relevant information.
This is similar to the Atlas Home landing page.
However these websites have other pages. You can go to ClearPeople.com/atlas-platform. You are still inside the ClearPeople website, but you are now viewing a different web page with different information, but still in the context of ClearPeople.com
If you go to Nike.com you can visit the Football page nike.com/football. You are still in the nike.com domain but are looking at a different web page.
These additional pages do not contain the content you are looking at. The content is stored centrally within nike.com in a back-end content management system (CMS), and displayed in the football page dynamically. The Football page is just a way to categorize and display information. A relationship is created as a hierarchy, seen by the forward slash, but often represented visually from the main menu.
In Atlas, as this platform sits inside your organization's SharePoint Online tenant, every Atlas workspace will have it's own unique URL - as we have discussed, each workspace is it's own container - it's own house. As we know and have discussed, a page (content) needs to sit within a workspace.
- clearpeople.sharepoint.com = our SharePoint tenant
- clearpeople.sharepoint.com/sites/Atlas = an Atlas workspace
- clearpeople.sharepoint.com/sites/Atlas/sitepages/Training.aspx = the training page inside the Atlas workspace
You cannot present something to a user on a website without it sitting on a webpage. How do you view football boots? On a web page, inside the website.
How do you view an Event in Atlas? From a page, inside a workspace.
How do you view a Page? Inside a workspace, from within your Atlas/SharePoint environment.
Atlas/SharePoint > workspace > page/document/event
Page Content Types
Once a page is created, it will reside inside the workspace you created the page in (the page library to be exact, where pages are created and stored). There are 4x page content types in Atlas available to users to make categorization and searching easier:
These pages are created by users via page templates.
What is a page template?
We will assume your organization will have templated documents like PowerPoints which help dictate a ready-made design. These PowerPoint or document templates are still Microsoft Office documents. Having a template available for a Word Document or a PowerPoint doesn’t stop them being a certain type of document.
In this analogy, Microsoft Office document types are all pages, PowerPoint is it’s own page content type (such as Landing), Word is it’s own content type (such as News), and you create a PowerPoint or Word document by using your corporate template so that a specific design is already set, rather than a blank PowerPoint or Word document.
Within your workspace you can select from page templates in order to produce your desired page content type. E.g. you want to create a piece of News, this needs to be a News Page content type, and is created by selecting the News Page Template.
You can create your own custom page templates for a bespoke design, look & feel.
You can read more about how to manage, modify and create new page templates here
Summary
The diagram below should help visually explain the Atlas architecture. We can see workspaces are their own areas and are separate to one another, and that pages and documents are stored within them, almost as another level in the hierarchy. This is often seen in URLs for content.
Summary
- Workspaces are different to pages
- Workspaces act as a container to store different types of content
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- Pages, Documents, Events etc. are all content which has to be stored in a workspace.
- Workspaces are not content themselves, but architectural areas in which to store content.
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- You need a workspace available in order to create a page - that page will then reside within that workspace
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- You can create pages within workspaces, you cannot create workspaces within pages - the workspace is the "top level" container in Atlas.
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- Page are used to display information to the end user
- There are 4x page content types each with its own template
- You create a page by selecting a page template - which has a ready-made visual design - similar to branded Microsoft Office templates used in your organization.
- You can create your own page template for easy repetition of a pre-determined design across many different pages.
Further help and assistance
Our advice would be to get hands on with Atlas, create, edit and build a page (inside a specific workspace), upload some documents (inside the same workspace), browse the Site contents of that workspace, and review the page library and document library to find your content. And as a bonus, try searching for your new content from the Search panel.
Using these functionalities and areas should stop it being only theoretical. Staying with the analogies, it's very hard to understand how to drive a car by reading a book or having someone explain it to you over a phone. Instead, the best way to understanding how to drive a car, and why gears are different to clutches, is to get in the car and practice driving, and use the tools which comprise the technology as a whole.
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