Workspaces

A workspace is the most important concept in Dalea. It is simultaneously:

• a collaboration unit — the set of people who can see and operate on the work,
• a data boundary — schemas, records and inventory in one workspace are invisible to another,
• a storage quota carrier — quota and feature flags are issued to the workspace via its parent organisation's tier.

Anatomy of a workspace

The sidebar groups a workspace's areas under Workspace (Home, Documents, Templates), Operations (Data, Inventory, Calendar, Provenance) and Extend (Addons, Community):

Documents, Templates, Inventory and Calendar appear only when the parent organisation has the matching feature enabled. Search is not a sidebar entry: it opens from the command palette with ⌘K.

When to make a new workspace

Make a new workspace when either:

• the people change (an external CRO needs limited access; a manuscript review group shouldn't see in-progress data); or
• the data boundary changes (a new programme starts and you don't want it polluting the search index of an older one).

Creating one is low-ceremony: give it a name and it exists. The count is capped per organisation by tier, though. Free allows 1 workspace, Pro 5 allows 2, Pro 10 allows 3, Academic 10, and Enterprise is unlimited. Each workspace also draws its storage allocation from the organisation's pool, so check the tier before you plan a split.

When to keep one big workspace

Keep work in one workspace when team and data are the same and you want to:

• reference the same inventory of reagents across studies,
• reuse the same data environment (e.g. a single "In-vivo PK" schema across multiple programmes),
• search across all running studies in one query.

A common pattern in biopharma: one workspace per programme, with projects inside the workspace for individual studies. Compound libraries and reagent freezers often live in their own workspace and are referenced from study workspaces by ID.

Switching workspaces

Click your workspace name in the sidebar header. The dropdown groups workspaces by organisation: free-tier organisations are labelled Personal and come first, then your other organisations in alphabetical order, then Shared with me. Inside each group, workspaces are ordered by when the workspace record was last modified. The currently open workspace is highlighted and carries a check mark.

The switcher is click-only; there is no keyboard shortcut for it.

Workspace settings

Settings → Workspaces → <name> exposes these tabs:

• General: name, icon, colour, description
• Members: invite, change role, remove
• Storage: the workspace's allocation and what is consuming it
• Roles: create or edit custom roles alongside the five built-in ones (owner, data engineer, editor, commenter, viewer). Workspace owner only.
• Applications: OAuth clients that can reach this workspace over the API or MCP (e.g. Claude Desktop). Needs the "view OAuth clients" permission.
• Audit Reviews: the workspace's audit review queue. Needs the "view audit reviews" permission.
• Review Policies, AI Skills and Onboarding: each shown to members whose role carries the matching workspace permission.

What's next