Workspaces and Environments

How it works

When you sign in for the first time, you create a Workspace. You choose its data center, and all data of the Workspace is stored in that data center and in the same storage container. To explore the product with demo data first, get a demo environment through try.rencore.com. A demo environment cannot connect a real tenant. To try Rencore Governance on your own tenant first, see Start a Rencore Lite trial.

You then connect your Microsoft 365 tenant. It becomes the Environment of the Workspace. A Workspace has one Environment, and an Environment belongs to one Workspace. Settings that apply to the tenant, such as connectors, consent, currency, notifications and mail settings, live under Environment Settings. Settings for the Workspace live under Workspace Settings: its name and description, with the Workspace ID and data center shown under General Settings, its Environment, and its Appearance, the branding and the features available in the Workspace and its Environment. Users, roles and teams are managed under Users & Roles.

If you need separate views of one tenant, you add Virtual Environments. Each one carries its own selection of inventory objects, dashboards, policies and reports, and its own permissions. Creating them is called tenant segmentation and is included in the Enterprise Plan.

Term	What it is	How many
Workspace	The container for settings, users, roles and one Environment	One per organization you govern
Environment	The connected Microsoft 365 tenant and its scanned data	One per Workspace
Virtual Environment	A logical part of one Environment, such as a department or region	As many as you set up
Demo environment	An Environment filled with demo data instead of tenant data	Created through try.rencore.com, with its own 14-day trial period

Example

A company with offices in Germany and the United States connects its tenant to one Workspace. The central IT team works in the Environment and sees everything. Each country team gets a Virtual Environment that shows only its own users, sites and Teams, with its own dashboards and policies.

A partner who governs several customers creates one Workspace per customer instead, so each customer sees only its own tenant.

Finding your way around

Every page in an Environment has the same frame: the navigation bar on the left and the page on the right. This is the home page.

1. Logo: opens the home page of the current Environment. Your Workspace can show its own logo instead, see Change appearance.
2. Page header: the title of the page. On the home page, a greeting and a time period filter: 30 days, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year or 2 years.
3. Page content: on the home page, tiles with the top numbers and items for Inventory, Reports, Policies, Provisioning, Automations and access reviews.
4. Navigation bar: Home, Search, Inventory, Dashboards, Reports, Policies, Automation, Review and Provisioning. It shows only the areas your role can open and your Subscription includes.
5. User menu: your name and email, “Profile & Preferences” (your photo, time zone, date, time and number formats, and your default Workspace) and “Sign out”.
6. Workspace selector: shows the current Workspace. Use it to switch to another Workspace, to the Environment or to one of its Virtual Environments, or to open All workspaces.
7. Settings: Feedback, Workspace Settings, Environment Settings, Users & Roles and Account & Billing, plus links to the terms, terms of service, copyrights, privacy policy and third-party licenses.
8. Collapse: collapses the navigation bar to icons, or expands it again.
9. Search: directly below Home, finds inventories, reports, policies, automations, reviews and provisioning templates by title or description. See Search Rencore Governance.

Between Settings and Collapse, “Experience Teams App” takes you to the Rencore Teams App.

How it relates to other concepts

• Everything else works inside one Environment: the inventory is scanned from it, and policies, reports and dashboards run on its data.
• Connectors and consent are set per Environment, and add-on modules are activated per Environment.
• Roles and teams are assigned per Workspace. You can invite users to the Workspace or to a single Environment.
• Automations are not available in a Virtual Environment, and Search there covers only Inventory, Reports and Policies.
• A Rencore Workspace is not the same as a Microsoft 365 workspace. The Rencore Teams App uses “workspaces” for the Teams, SharePoint sites, Viva Engage communities and Microsoft 365 Groups people own or belong to.