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Workspaces and Knowledge

Workspaces organize people, agents, documents, tasks, workflows, and knowledge under one operational boundary — typically one per part of your business: a property you manage, a support inbox, a marketing function.

Interface Modes​

A saved choice is kept. Without one, existing users default to Professional without a first-use prompt; new users see User Guide with Simple preselected. Select Start to save and begin the tour. Reopen it from More → User Guide, or change mode in Settings → Appearance → Interface mode. Your choice is saved in this browser.

  • Simple focuses on chat and Install Workspace, which imports a Blueprint JSON file in self-hosted Manor AI. Workspace chat still shows Manor and the agents' avatars and names, plus the member count, as read-only team information. Necessary run statuses, approvals, artifacts, and connection setup remain accessible.
  • Professional provides the full Workspace pages, configuration controls, and detailed chat activity.

Switching modes changes presentation, not permissions, execution, or data. Existing conversations and text drafts remain available.

Workspaces​

A workspace scopes:

  • Agents and skills (via service mappings and subscriptions).
  • Conversations and tasks.
  • Goals and their execution plans.
  • Documents and file assets.
  • Knowledge sources.
  • Integration credentials and channels.
  • Governance rules, permissions, and audit history.

In Professional mode, a workspace page has tabs for its overview (services, matched agents, current work, operating score), goals, tasks, documents, channels, agents, activity, and settings. Workspace chat is contextual: it sees the workspace's services, goals, agents, and recent activity, and can start workflows directly from a message.

In Professional mode, creating a workspace is a guided, chat-style flow — Manor helps you fill in the workspace's purpose, services, staff, channels, and seed knowledge, then creates it. You can also install a blueprint to start from a packaged configuration.

Deleting a Workspace​

Deleting a workspace moves it to Trash for the configured grace period (30 days by default), during which it can be restored. New workspace work stops immediately; user-created automations and live Workflow action grants are removed. Restore recreates the workspace's built-in runtime schedules. After the grace period, background purge permanently removes its runtime records, tasks, conversations, bindings, and workspace-specific Knowledge groups and links.

Knowledge Documents, folders, source files, versions, and their access controls are entity-owned and retained. Deleting a workspace does not delete those documents or widen their access: members-only Knowledge remains restricted after its source workspace is removed. Manage retained files through Knowledge with the appropriate resource permissions.

Knowledge​

The knowledge system indexes documents so agents can cite them. In Professional mode, upload PDFs, Word and Excel files, Markdown, plain text, slide decks, or images to Knowledge, and group documents into knowledge bases by purpose ("House Rules", "Vendor Contacts", "FAQ"). Attach groups to a workspace and its agents use them automatically.

Sharing Roles​

Use Share → Add people to choose one of four roles on a document or folder:

  • Viewer can read it.
  • Commenter can read and comment.
  • Editor can edit it and upload into shared folders.
  • Co-owner has the same resource permissions as the owner, including external sharing, signature requests, deletion, and access management.

The former Curator / Access manager option has been removed. Existing grants with editing access display as Editor and keep their capabilities until you explicitly change or remove access. Grants without editing access appear as Viewer or Commenter. Selecting Editor applies the standard Editor permissions.

Select Co-owner in a colleague's role menu when they need full control. The original owner remains recorded as the owner. Classification restrictions and required approvals apply to both roles. Temporary Co-owner access cannot create grants or sharing links that outlast that access. Approved external sharing links start their configured lifetime when approval is granted, bounded by the requester's original and current access expiry. Renaming a Workspace root folder requires Workspace management permission. Moving a document to Trash revokes its sharing grants and links, including Co-owner access. The original owner or a global Knowledge manager can restore it; restoration does not reinstate revoked sharing grants.

To send a PDF for signature, a Co-owner uses their own connected email account. Add each person with Add signer and assign a required signature field to each signer before continuing to the preview. In Recipient emails, enter one or more addresses separated by commas for the same person. Any invited address can verify by email and complete that person's signature once; the signature history records the address used. A request supports up to 10 email addresses across all signers. Every signer must complete their own fields before a request with multiple signers is finalized.

How Retrieval Works​

Retrieval is chunk-level and hybrid, fused with Reciprocal Rank Fusion:

  1. Documents are split into ~1,600-character chunks; each chunk gets its own embedding (pgvector, generated by the bundled Ollama service).
  2. A query runs vector search and trigram/lexical search (CJK-safe) over chunks, plus filename matching.
  3. Results are deduplicated to the best chunk per document and rank-fused, so exact-term matches and semantic matches both surface.

Freshly uploaded documents that aren't indexed yet can still be found in explicitly scoped searches — the runtime falls back to reading the file directly within a workspace or named knowledge-base scope.

The search bar (and GET /api/v1/search?q=) does fast substring search across tasks, documents, agents, and conversations, honoring per-user document and workspace permissions. It complements — not replaces — the semantic rag retrieval agents use for content questions.

Data Isolation​

Everything is scoped to your entity (organization), and workspace boundaries apply within it: agents see the workspaces they're mapped into, and workspace-scoped results are permission-filtered per user. Keep workspace boundaries meaningful — do not mix unrelated teams or clients in one workspace unless they intentionally share agents, documents, and memory.