Apps & Functional Areas
Apps as Containers for Business Processes
An app is a self-contained environment within a workspace, designed to manage and execute specific business processes or workflows such as financial planning, resource management, or manpower planning. Each app can include its own models, rules, and sheets tailored to its purpose, while still leveraging shared resources like dimensions, permissions, and processes for smooth collaboration across teams.
Apps provide a structured way to organize related content and workflows, ensuring clarity and efficiency. Users can access apps from the Explore pane under Space, where each app lists its functional areas along with associated sheets, models, rules, boards, and workbooks. This organization makes it easier to navigate and manage complex processes within a unified environment.
Functional Areas for Organizing Related Content
A functional area represents a specific business function or domain within an organization, designed to streamline processes and standardize authorization and workflow across multiple models. By grouping related models and objects under a single functional area, organizations can ensure better control, consistency, and clarity in managing business processes.
Functional areas serve as containers for related content such as sheets, boards, models, rules, and workbooks. They are accessible within apps from the Explore section of the platform. By default, each space includes a Public functional area, which contains folders like Stories and Calculations. Users with appropriate permissions can create new items within functional areas, such as folders, sheets, transactions, journals, lists, tables, and models.
The Catalog view provides a structured overview of all objects within a functional area, displaying details like name, title, and type. This organization helps users navigate and manage complex workflows efficiently. Functional areas also include a Metrics tab, which lists metrics associated with the area, along with details such as data type, formula, dimensions, and any applied data protection rules.
Functional areas are essential for:
Authorization Control: They include mandatory control dimensions to manage access.
Workflow Management: They remove dependency on individual models for authorization and workflow, enabling cross-model processes.
Flexibility: Users can create, edit, copy, or delete functional areas as needed, and manage associated objects through intuitive options.
This structure ensures that related content is logically grouped, improving usability, security, and operational efficiency.
App Security and Access Control
Security is a critical feature of apps, especially when handling sensitive or confidential information. When an app is marked as secure, permissions and data access can only be managed from the app’s Permissions tab, which is accessible exclusively to app owners. By default, the user who creates the app becomes its owner, and additional owners can be assigned as needed.
App owners have full control over:
Role Management: Create roles, assign users, and update permissions for app objects and data.
Access Control: Restrict visibility and actions based on user roles, ensuring only authorized individuals can view or modify sensitive content.
Critical Operations: In secure apps, only owners can perform tasks such as recalculating metrics or exporting metric details.
These measures provide an extra layer of protection, ensuring that sensitive business data remains secure and accessible only to designated users.