ConneX Overview
Atlas ConneX is an application in both Teams and M365 which is included in all Atlas deployments to allow your organisation to effectively create and manage all their workspaces in Microsoft 365. Importantly, this is not just for Atlas workspaces but also non-Atlas Microsoft workloads such as; Yammer communities, Microsoft Teams and M365 Groups.
**Out-of-the-box Microsoft SharePoint sites are not shown in ConneX**
Why ConneX?
Outside of Atlas, the only way to consolidate all 'sites' is from within the SharePoint Admin center, where the search and review functionality is not very user friendly. One critical drawback of this which ConneX looks to solve is that non-IT administrators are unable to access an active site list, as they are bound by the same rules as regular users - only seeing what they have permissions to. This is important, as in our experience platform owners, knowledge managers, and those non-IT colleagues of critical importance to Atlas and the digital workplace experience require a view of all sites for overview, management, and to help with governance, to get a more holistic view of what is going on.
While end users will only see workspaces in ConneX that they have existing permissions for, ConneX Enterprise Admins can be assigned the ability to see all workspaces regardless of permissions. Admins can then give themselves permissions to any workspace by editing the workload in ConneX. Note that permissions to the site and it's contents are not given and are still not accessible, just the ability to view the workspace and edit the workspace details accordingly.
You can read more about ConneX Permissions here.
ConneX Interface & User Experience
The ConneX dashboards allows users to search and filter through all sites they have permissions to see, meaning owners can manage their workspaces from within Atlas, including but not limited to permissions, title, URL, description and tagging. As you may know Microsoft Teams and SharePoint does not provide the best experience when browsing through your sites with limited filtering experiences.
ConneX allows users to search, filter, and re-order by a number of different refiners. You can even filter by public/private, externally shared, who has membership, dates created, as well as the 5 core Atlas termsets. This can be very useful for users, platform owners and IT admins alike when searching or browsing workspaces or when conducting regular governance monitoring or reviews, as SP admin does not provide this functionality.
Editing a workspace within ConneX (link to dedicated article)
Each workspace is shown as a card like the below, showing title, description, workspace type, date, etc, but also with quick links to document library, permissions, and for M365 Groups, shortcuts to OneNote, Planner and Shared Mailbox. Users and owners can also use the vertical ellipses in the top-right to pin or edit workspaces respectively.
For this reason we consider the ConneX UI to provide multiple advantages when it comes to users governing their own workspaces as well as platform owners and IT admins easily governing and managing all workspaces too.
Provisioning Workspaces
The collation and presentation of sites and groups is only half the story. No, really.
ConneX provides a powerful provisioning engine to create Atlas workspaces, where more granular permissions can be assigned to different users and user groups to aid good governance.
There are various "Creator" Active Directory groups that give users the ability to create certain types of workspace, or any type of workspace, just by following a simple creation process. IT can manage permissions to ConneX using these groups
But the fun doesn't stop there, oh no. Using Atlas ConneX Studio, our in-house site templating tool, ConneX Studio admins can create and present different workspace templates, perhaps with different layouts and designs, default folder structures and settings, and target these workspaces to different AD Groups.
For example, the Marketing team could only have access to provision the Marketing Workspace Template, whilst the Business Development team only has access to provision the BID or SALES workspace templates, so line of business needs can be catered for and easily controlled, with an array of different settings, configurations and governance options, from default ownership (useful for IT), default tagging, and even sensitivity labelling which we consider to be a huge advantage for governance and compliance, although does take time for IT to configure and test.
Summary
ConneX is your one-stop-shop for workspace provisioning and governance, both inside and outside of Atlas, where users, platforms owners/those with elevated permissions and IT admins can all manage workspaces to varying levels of ability, being able to control ConneX permissions granularly across the board, with ConneX Studio presenting even more options for different workspace provisioning.
To learn more, please find a number of relevant articles below or get in touch with your ClearPeople/Atlas representative
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