Best practices on organizing your Workspace for studios big or small
Workspace Level
Your Workspace can be thought of as the highest level of the organizational hierarchy of SyncSketch.
When purchasing a paid account, the number of seats and total storage purchased will be available within a single Workspace.
We typically recommend IT and management (Supervisors, Producers, etc) be given roles at a Workspace level.
Owners, Admins and Managers are all Workspace level roles - please refer to our Roles, Permissions & User Access Management support article for more info on these roles.
Project Level
Projects are contained within a Workspace, and are the next level down in the hierarchy. There is no limit on how many Projects can be created.
We typically recommend Artists and Coordinators be given roles at a Project level.
Project Admin, Member, Restricted Member, Reviewer and Viewer are all Project level roles – please refer to our Roles, Permissions & User Access Management support article for more info on these roles.
Thinning the herd
The Workspace Settings displays a list of Projects, and these lists can get pretty big. Project naming conventions can be implemented to make filtering the list easy using the Project Filter search bar (see below for details). Enterprise customers have access to a superior method: Project Tagging. Archiving Projects can also be helpful, and can improve seat usage.
Review Level
Reviews are contained within a Project and are the lowest level of the hierarchy. This is the entity that contains the media you upload to view in a Review session. There is no limit on how many Reviews can be created.
Thinning the herd
To organize and filter your reviews e.g. for departments within a Project and across Reviews, you can use Review Groups - you can learn more about that here. Implementing naming conventions for Reviews can be useful for finding matching reviews using the search filter in the Project Overview (see below for details). To hide reviews from the list unless you explicitly need to view them, try Archiving Reviews. Enterprise level customers can also set policies for the automatic archiving and deletion of reviews after specified timeframes.
Best Practices - Small to Medium Companies
Small to medium studios often work on multiple shows at one time, with staff crossing over where needed. We typically recommend creating a Project for each show in house, keeping IT and management in roles at the Workspace level, and adding artist access on projects as needed.
Best Practices - Large Organization (Multiple Locations)
In larger organizations that have multiple locations around the world, that are not independent subsidiaries, a decision on how to best structure needs to be made. We typically see two common scenarios:
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- Work on projects is done utilizing teams/staff from multiple facilities or locations simultaneously
- Each location works on projects contained within only that location
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In the first example, we recommend structuring your Workspace in the same way that we suggested above for a small to medium size studio. By utilizing the Project level for each show, you can easily assign staff from any facility or remote location that is working on that show.
In the second example, you could work in the same way - perhaps appending a facility name onto your Project name. Alternatively, you might just create a single project for each location - and that Project would contain all reviews for that single location - like this:
Best Practices - Parent Company with Independent Subsidiaries
In the case of large parent companies with subsidiaries, we typically recommend legal agreements be handled at the parent company level with each subsidiary setting up their own Workspace.
Often these independently-run subsidiaries have their own accounting departments that handle billing, and their own IT and management teams that are responsible for integrating new tools into the pipeline.
This setup will allow a bit more flexibility, as each subsidiary will have the entire hierarchy available to them.
Please note if you're a large organization with multiple locations and are considering this structure: We like to point out that creating and maintaining multiple Workspaces naturally require more technical and security-related set-up and support. Billing, user seats, storage, etc will all be separate for each Workspace and require management oversight on each one.
For this reason, we only recommend companies that have subsidiaries with separate accounting and IT departments to consider this structure.
The Power of Naming
Some of our customers have expressed the desire to have more levels of hierarchy (or the ability to create multiple workspaces within an organization) to better organize complex workflows. Here at SyncSketch we like to keep things as simple and clean as possible - to make your experience smooth and easy. So, how do we accommodate those customers? One great tool for organization is naming conventions. By including some additional info in the name of a Project or Review, you can expand your levels of organization. For example, if you're a large organization and have chosen to use the Project level for each location/facility, you can include a prefix on the name of each Review within that Project to indicate the show name. You can easily search for projects with that name to quickly filter your list.
Review Groups
Another great way to add some additional organization is with Review Groups - you can learn more about that here. Assigning these can be used by members to filter the Reviews in the Project Overview to display only the reviews that are relevant to them, for example.
Project Tags
Enterprise customers can apply one or more user-defined tags to projects. These can group projects by department or team, or development stages or really anything. These tags can be used to search and to filter lists and to keep project grouped sensibly. See Project Tags for details.
Future of Organization
We're not stopping here, we have a lot of great things in development for your organizational needs - including:
- Folders/Groups - allows you to group media into folders within a Review
- Tags at the Review level
- Teams - to manage user and project permissions as groups of users instead of individuals
Of course, we always love to hear your feedback, so if you have any other great ideas for us to consider - please let us know!