Workspaces, teams and projects

This article explains how EmailShepherd organizes your emails into workspaces, teams and projects, and how each one controls what people can see. Read it before you set up your organization, so you can choose the right structure.

How it fits together

Your organization is split into one or more workspaces. Each workspace contains teams, and each team owns projects, which hold your emails:

Organization
├── Users, roles, review groups, test lists
└── Workspace
    ├── Email Design Systems, personalization tags, images, connectors and other shared resources
    └── Team
        └── Project
            └── Emails

What someone can see depends on which workspaces and teams they belong to. What they can do there depends on their role.

Projects

A project is a group of related emails, such as a newsletter series, a product launch or an onboarding sequence. Every project belongs to one team.

To create one, see How to create a project.

Teams

Teams control who can see which projects. A user can see a project only if they’re a member of the team that owns it. For example, you could have a Marketing team and a Product team, so each one only sees its own emails.

• Users can belong to more than one team.
• A team belongs to one workspace, and its members must also be members of that workspace.
• Users with the Access All Teams permission, such as Admins, can see every team’s projects without being a member.

Tip

A user who isn’t a member of any team can sign in, but won’t see any projects or emails.

To create teams and manage their members, see Teams.

Workspaces

Workspaces keep groups of resources separate. Everything inside a workspace, such as its personalization tags, images, conditionals and connectors, can only be used in that workspace.

Use separate workspaces when parts of your organization shouldn’t share these resources, for example:

• Different brands or subsidiaries.
• Different regions or business units that run their own email programs.
• A staging workspace for testing changes before you make them in your main workspace.

If everyone uses the same resources, one workspace is enough, and you can use teams to control who sees which emails.

Users can only see the workspaces they’re a member of, unless they have the Access All Workspaces permission, as Admins do.

To create workspaces and manage their members, see Workspaces.

What belongs to a workspace

Each workspace has its own:

• Teams, projects and emails
• Email Design Systems and brand profiles
• Layouts, component presets and content blocks
• Personalization tags, conditionals, link tracking profiles and dynamic content profiles
• Images in the image library
• Connectors and feeds
• AI agents, AI reviewers and skills
• MCP servers

Email Design Systems and brand profiles can also be shared with other workspaces. See Share an Email Design System across workspaces.

These belong to the whole organization and are the same in every workspace:

• Users and roles
• Review groups
• Test lists
• API keys

Example structures

A single marketing team that shares everything:

Organization: Acme
└── Workspace: Acme
    └── Team: Marketing
        ├── Project: Monthly newsletter
        └── Project: Spring launch

A company with two brands that each need their own design system, images and personalization tags:

Organization: Parent Company
├── Workspace: Brand A
│   ├── Team: Brand A Marketing
│   └── Team: Brand A Lifecycle
└── Workspace: Brand B
    ├── Team: Brand B Marketing
    └── Team: Brand B Customer Success

Set up your organization

1. Decide whether you need more than one workspace. If you do, create your workspaces.
2. Create a team for each group of people who work on the same emails.
3. Invite your users and add them to the right workspaces and teams.
4. Create a project and start building emails.