Optimize Spaces for your organization

This article is intended for administrators. If you want to learn how to create and join spaces, visit the The power of Spaces

Spaces are:

  • A center of work
    Spaces serve as a single place for a team's work, decisions, announcements, and discussions. Everyone stays in sync with access to the same content and visibility into decisions. Workspace apps and third-party tools are integrated in Spaces, right where you need them.
  • Topic oriented
    Topic-focused spaces help people efficiently organize spaces and effectively set up notifications.
  • A safe space for discussion
    Spaces provide a fast, expressive, and lightweight environment with more casual chat-based conversations and emojis. This informal communication style lowers the barriers to engagement and encourages more free-flowing conversations and psychological safety for people in your organization.

Spaces or group conversations?

Spaces are ideal for many communication goals, as described above. We recommend Spaces as the primary place in Workspace for project and team-oriented collaboration, as well as social discussions and general knowledge sharing that will continue on an ongoing basis.

Small group conversations or 1:1 chats are perfect for quick, ad hoc messaging, such as informal clarifications, quick follow ups, back channel communications that don't need a large audience, and highly temporal discussions.

For more details about when you might want to use these and other communication tools, see Create private, discoverable, or open spaces

After creating a space, users in your organization can choose between private, discoverable, or open access. If your organization has multiple target audiences, space owners and managers can use advanced settings to control visibility by selecting target audiences that can discover or join a space. Only one target audience can be configured for who can join a space.

Private spaces are ideal for team and group discussions, or specific projects. If a user wants to join a private space, a space member must invite or add the person to the space. Private spaces remain hidden from anyone who isn’t a member or an invitee.

Discoverable spaces are for discussions that should remain private, but should allow other users to request to join them. When a space is discoverable, users can find the space, check its name and description, and request to join. Messages are only visible to users who have joined.

Open spaces are useful for discussions that aren’t limited to specific individuals or teams. When a space is open, users can browse, preview messages, and join the space. If they have a link to the space, they can join it through the link.

Best practices for setting up spaces

Here are some suggestions to help your organization use spaces effectively.

  • In most situations, we recommend that you turn history on by default so people can reference knowledge and discussions that happened in the past. When history is off, the conversation may disappear before everyone involved has a chance to see it. If your Workspace edition allows it, consider setting the History is ALWAYS ON option.
  • Set up and communicate your company's guidelines for chat etiquette. This should cover situations when you want your organization to use email, direct messages, small group conversations, or spaces, and whether expected response times are different for these communication channels.
  • Here are some specific guidelines that we recommend:
  • Use spaces for asynchronous discussions where people don't have to be online at the same time. Instead, they can read and respond on their own schedules.
  • Use @mentions to draw attention to individuals and make sure they're notified. Let users know that they can use @all to get the attention of everyone in a space, but remind them that this notifies everyone. Consider adding examples of situations where this would or wouldn't be recommended in your organization.
  • Encourage people to add high-level context when they @mention people in chat, especially in larger group conversations and spaces. This makes it easier for colleagues to know what you're referring to at a high-level without having to review the entire space.
  • To help your users reply to specific messages without disrupting the main conversation happening in the space, consider using in-line threading so your users can branch replies into separate conversations. Manage Spaces in your organization

    Anyone in your organization who creates a space is automatically a space owner and can assign more people to the role. For details, see

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Last updated 2026年08月27日 UTC.