Your first workspace

Naming it, the five roles, inviting your team.

A workspace is the unit of collaboration in Dalea. It contains your documents, your data schemas, and your inventory. Members of a workspace see and can operate on everything in it according to their role.

Rename your first workspace

The sign-up questionnaire asks you to name your first workspace, pre-filling the field from your display name (Your name's Workspace). If you accepted the default, most teams immediately change it to a study or programme code:

  1. Open workspace settings

    Click the workspace name in the sidebar header, then Manage Workspaces at the bottom of the switcher, and pick the workspace from the list. The direct route is Settings → Workspaces.

  2. Update name, icon and colour

    Pick something specific. IND-128 Discovery beats My workspace. The icon (an emoji) and the colour appear on the workspace badge in the sidebar header and in the workspace switcher, so visual differentiation matters once you join three or four workspaces.

  3. Add a description

    A one-line description ("Lead optimisation for the EGFR programme; PK and tox leads.") tells future members who joins this workspace and why.

Invite your team

Workspaces support custom roles, but five built-ins cover most labs:

Owner
Full control, including workspace deletion, member management, audit review and OAuth client management.
Data Engineer
Full data and schema control (including permanent data deletion), inventory structure, document and project editing, and member invites. Cannot delete the workspace, remove members or change their roles, manage OAuth clients, or manage and export the audit trail. Schema changes require an audit reason.
Editor
Edit documents, comments, data and inventory records; run queries. Cannot change schemas.
Commenter
Read documents and data. Add comments. No structural edits.
Viewer
Read-only.
One invitation covers the org and the workspaces

Go to Settings → Workspaces, open the workspace, then the Members tab and click Invite Member. An invitation is an organisation role plus per-workspace role grants, so you invite by email and grant a workspace seat in the same step. The server decides what happens next: someone who is already an organisation member gets their grants applied immediately, and anyone else gets a pending invitation to accept.

Pre-flight checklist

Before you start filling the workspace with content, take 90 seconds to:

  • Decide who has each role. Owner is for one or two people; Editor for everyday scientists; Data Engineer for whoever is allowed to change the schema.
  • Decide what your projects will be. Projects (which we'll create in a moment) group documents and files. Keep them coarse — usually one per study or campaign.
  • Pick a naming convention for studies. Something like <programme>-<modality>-<index> (e.g. EGFR-AB-007) helps you find things in three years.

What's next