Overview of OpenFin Workspace

OpenFin Workspace is a unified space for work, powered by a set of tools designed to help your firm increase productivity and deliver exceptional employee experiences. Key components of Workspace include a keyboard-driven digital assistant for app discovery and search; a browser for displaying content with complex layouts and shared context; and a rich, actionable notification center, experiences that accelerate time to market, and easy-to-use APIs for hyper-customization.

OpenFin Workspace lets your users create and manage their own workspaces that include the apps, workflows and content they need to get their jobs done. Your developers implement the APIs of the Workspace SDK and the Workspace Platform SDK to control access to the applications and content your users need. You can provide as much or as little user control as your environment requires.

Key components

OpenFin Workspace consists of several components. You can choose which ones to enable and integrate with via a Workspace platform application.

Home: The "nerve center" of Workspace, Home provides a text box interface for searching, issuing commands, and launching applications and content. A Workspace platform application can provide commands and support searches, to give end-users quick access to its content.
Browser: Providing more focus and control than a general-purpose web browser, OpenFin Browser supports creating, saving and reloading complex layouts of interconnected apps and content views.

In Workspace v17.2 or later, translated strings for Browser UI elements are available. See Provide localized strings in Workspace.

Storefront: You can provide users with the ability to peruse and select apps and content to use within your Workspace platform, similar to services for mobile phone apps or add-ons for complex software. You can define a landing page and footer for a branded experience, list items available, provide details about them, and launch what the user has selected. Refer to Provide storefront content for details.
Dock: In contrast to the keyboard-driven interface of Home, Dock is a small icon toolbar that enables quick access to Workspace features via a mouse.
Notification Center: Help end-users stay up to date with events and the latest information via desktop alerts and a central location for notifications from OpenFin apps. When users interact with a notification, the app that generated it receives and can respond to interaction events.

In Workspace v10 or later, if you register multiple Workspace platforms, the same platform is displayed across all registered Workspace components: Home, Store, and Dock. Notification Center supports this feature differently. See Multiple platforms in Notification Center for details.

How it works

You build your Workspace platform using the APIs of the Workspace Platform SDK, which lets you customize the Workspace components that OpenFin securely hosts on its CDN. See the API reference documentation for Workspace and Workspace-Platform.
Each release of the Workspace product is versioned. You can lock the Workspace version you run with Desktop Owner Settings. See Manage versions of Workspace for details.