What are some of the existing limitations to Prism Cloud Workspaces

Prism Cloud workspaces are the shared online space associated with a Prism subscription where individuals may publish their Prism projects to be shared with other workspace members or external Prism Cloud users. Projects published into workspaces are contained within folders to help organize content within the workspace, making it easier to navigate and collaborate. Once a project has been published to Prism Cloud, discussions may be created in which multiple Prism Cloud users may provide feedback or comments on the published work.

Prism Cloud workspaces have a number of limitations, and this page provides information on some of these aspects:

There is a one-to-one relationship between Prism subscriptions and Prism Cloud workspaces

Prism Cloud workspaces are created in association with a new or existing Prism subscription. This conveniently allows users who activate the Prism desktop application to be automatically added to the associated Prism Cloud workspace. This removes a significant amount of effort on the part of the workspace owner or administrator as Prism Cloud users generally do not need to be manually added to a Prism Cloud workspace. However, larger organizations often aggregate multiple independent research groups or labs within a single Prism subscription. In this situation, all of the members of these groups would be able to publish to - and browse - all of the common folders within the workspace.

There is a one-to-one relationship between a Prism desktop file and a Prism Cloud project

When a Prism file is published to Prism Cloud, a link is created between the published project and the file stored locally. This link allows the Prism Cloud project to be updated with changes made to the local file quickly and easily. However, a local Prism file can only be linked to a single Prism Cloud project at a time. This means that if a project is published "as new", any link to an existing Prism Cloud project will be removed, and the existing Prism Cloud project will become "orphaned" once the new Prism Cloud project is linked to the local Prism file. An "orphaned" Prism Cloud project is simply one which is no longer linked to an existing local Prism file, and thus can no longer be updated.

Prism Cloud does not currently offer folder-level permissions

There are two types of folders within Prism Cloud:

• Personal folder - a private folder unique to each user. Every user has their own personal folder, and other members of a workspace are not able to see or browse another users personal folder
• Common folders - these folders are listed in the navigator of their respective workspace, and any workspace member is able to view or browse projects published to these folders

Currently, there are no folder-level permissions. This means that it is not possible to create a folder within a workspace and specify a list of users that can (or can not) exclusively see or access it. For most workspaces, this is generally not a problem. The associated Prism subscription is used only by members of the same team, group, or lab, and so there is no concern of limiting who can - or can not - see work published to common folders within the workspace. However, for large organizations with multiple teams/groups/labs utilizing the same Prism subscription (see above), this may be problematic.

Note that projects published to a Personal folder may still be shared directly with other users. When a project is shared this way, it will be visible in the recipient's "Shared with me" folder regardless of the recipients workspace membership. However, as mentioned before, these projects cannot be found by browsing the workspace directly as personal folders are only visible to their individual owners.

Prism Cloud does not offer asset-level permissions

Projects published to Prism Cloud can be shared with any other Prism Cloud user (regardless of workspace membership). However, sharing a project with another user in this way grants them access to the entire published project. It is currently not possible to provide access to an individual graph, or any other subset of sheets within a published project.

Content within a user's personal folder is not accessible by any workspace owner or administrator

While generally considered a security benefit, this limitation to folder access may become a problem if/when a user is removed from a Prism Cloud workspace. Because no other workspace members (including administrators and the workspace owner) have the ability to access projects published to another user's personal folder, it is not possible to recover this content after a user is removed from a workspace.

There is no "nesting" capability for folders

Currently, Prism Cloud allows only a flat structure for folders:

• A folder can be created within a workspace
• A project must be published into a folder
• A folder cannot be created within another folder

This means that there is only one "level" of folders, and each new folder created within a workspace will be visible in the navigator for that workspace. With a large number of folders, this may make it difficult to find the desired folder. Note, however, that folders are listed in alphabetical order making it easier to find a specific folder within the list.

There is no "Search" functionality (or keyword/tag capability)

There is currently no way to search for a published project within a workspace. Additionally, there is no way to tag published projects with keywords that can be used to query and locate the published project.