Navigating Your Workspace: Assets & the Knowledge Repository

Start controlling the sprawl by understanding how your assets appear within Workstream.

Nicholas Freund avatar
Written by Nicholas Freund
Updated over a week ago

Welcome to Workstream! You're on your way to supercharging your analytics workflows, and empowering your stakeholders with a single place to discover, access, and contextualize your data assets. This article gives an overview of how to navigate around your assets within the knowledge repository.

If you have not yet added assets to your workspace, we recommend starting with this guide that walks you through the process.

Contents:

The Left Nav

The left nav is your quickest method of viewing relevant assets and conversations. At the top you will see a dropdown with your workspace name—this is where you can access your settings, in addition to viewing archived assets, and logging out.

Image showing the Workstream settings menu

Below that, you have the option to search across your workspace. This search returns assets, conversations, content overviews, tags, and collections. It will include archived assets.

Image of a search in Workstream using the starting string "coho" and retrieving results for "cohort"

Moving further down the left nav, you will see a number of options:

Insights and Recents are two quick ways of seeing activity in your workspace.

The Insights page shows crucial information about your analytics environment, including the number of assets added in the past day, and the number of assets that are currently broken. The recents page, meanwhile, shows assets that you have personally viewed recently.

The My Assets section is handy for seeing all assets you have access to.

The following section collects all assets that your team has certified.

Liked Assets provides a list of all the assets you have liked so you can easily reference them.

The Conversations section is the only item in the left nav that does not take you to a view of assets. You can read more about conversations in our article on navigating conversations.

Finally, the Collections section shows all the collections you currently have access to. Collections are groups of assets that are automatically populated according to flexible rules.

Image highlighting the "collections" section of the left nav

Workspace owners can also create collections here.

You will notice two sets of tags further down in the left nav. We'll discuss these in more depth in the section on filtering assets.

Asset Basics

Much of your time will be spent navigating between the different assets within your workspace. At a high level, there is some basic information you should understand when viewing an asset in the grid:

Image depicting the different part of an asset card in Workstream
  1. Status: Statuses include Active, In Development, Expiring, and Archived

  2. Preview, and icon showing the asset's vendor

    1. If the asset has a dbt or Monte Carlo status page, you will see two icons here—one for the vendor of the associated asset, and one for dbt or Monte Carlo.

      Image showing an asset card with an icon for both Tableau and dbt
  3. Title: The asset's name

  4. Tags: The asset vendor/type (i.e. Google Sheets, Dashboard, Look, etc.) will display with a colored tag. Vendor tags and those synced along with the asset (such as Looker projects or Tableau tags) are not editable, but custom Workstream tags can be added and removed

  5. Content Overview: This icon is filled in when there is a content overview present for an asset, and grayed out when there is not

  6. Conversations: The number of conversations concerning the asset (active and solved). This icon is grayed out when there are no conversations

  7. Lifecycle status editor: The asset's lifecycle status can be directly edited from this button

  8. Certification Status: Whether or not the asset has been certified by your team. Certified assets appear with a blue icon, while uncertified assets are grayed out. You can certify an asset directly from here

  9. Likes: See how many people "liked" the asset. If you liked the asset, the heart will be filled in. You can also like an asset on this page

Filtering

The asset grids within Workstream all support filtering and sorting, as well as switching between grid and list views. To change your view type, you can adjust the toggle in the top right corner of the page.

Video showing a user switching between grid and list views in the Workstream asset workspace

From the top of the page, you can filter by asset status, certification status, or liked status.

Video showing the expanded filter menu in the asset workspace

These filters can be combined, allowing you to filter for exactly what you're looking for. For example, you may want to view all assets that are certified but expiring soon, so that you can make sure assets that are still relevant don't expire. In that case, simply filter by the asset status "Expiring" and the certification status "Certified".

Filtering gets even more powerful when you add in the ability to filter by tags. Workstream supports filtering by both asset type tags and by tags that have been added to your assets (either through manually added tags, or automatically synced tags—learn more about synced tags in this article). This filtering can be carried out further down in the left nav by clicking on the relevant tag.

Image depicting tag and asset type filters in the left nav

Status-related tags are retained when filtering by tags, so if you are already filtering by lifecycle status or certification status, your results will combine both types of filters. Selecting options from the left nav, however, will overwrite status-related filters.

Sorting

The grid and list views also support sorting. You can sort by:

  • Recently Viewed

  • Name A To Z

  • Name Z To A

  • Newest

  • Oldest

When viewing assets in the grid view, the sorting options are in the menu at the top of the page:

Image showing the expanded sorting menu in the asset workspace

While in the list view you can click directly on the column headings to sort. Sorting will act in combination with any filters you already have in place.

Archived Assets

By default, archived assets are hidden from your views within Workstream. This is meant to keep your workspace as clutter-free as possible. However, if you do need to access your archived assets for any reason, you have two options. You can either use the status filter from within the asset grid, or select the "Archived Assets" menu option after clicking on the workspace name in the top left corner of the page.

Image pointing a user to the archived assets option under the Workstream settings

Archived assets can be restored to any of the other statuses at any time by an owner.

When you are ready to interact with an individual asset, click on it to open its asset details page. See more information about the asset details page in our help center article.

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