As your digital workplace grows and the navigation becomes more complex, the Spaces widget becomes an invaluable tool for Administrators. When placed on a Page or Space, it will fetch and display a curated list of Spaces, making it easy to add a list of links to projects, teams, or Solutions anywhere you need. 

The primary use case of the Spaces widget is to streamline your digital workplace's architecture, and make it easy for members to get where they need to go in a few clicks. It distinguishes itself from similar widgets by providing an easy list of Spaces to click through, as well as easily appending Space descriptions to the links. 

Navigation

Unlike the Navigation widget, the Spaces widget is entirely independent of the site structure. Spaces from anywhere can be included in the widget, giving you an easy place to merge navigation areas for easy browsing, or provide connections to team spaces that might be nested beneath other areas. Use this to bring together projects from across departments for easy access and oversight, or to pull together sets of related social groups in a Space. 

Membership

The Spaces widget also doesn't rely on membership in order to display Spaces. This makes it excellent for pulling together Spaces that all members have access to, like HR, governance, and compliance areas, or the Virtual Town Hall solution. It also opens up display options outside of people's department or team spaces, making it easy to browse between them, regardless of where they are in your digital workplace.

Access

The most important factor in using the Spaces widget is that it still respects people's access. Where the Links widget will display all of its contents to everyone who visits the Page it's on, the Spaces widget will only show Spaces that members have access to, letting you use access to shape the contents of the widget. For example, you might include all of your project Spaces, and give people an interface that's customized by their access and lets them easily move between projects that are relevant to them. 

The Spaces widget remains one of the best ways to create customized link resources out of the box, which will both reach anywhere in your Igloo and respect the access there. Like all widgets, it can be used in both Page and Space templates for easy copying. 

If you have questions about widgets, the Igloo platform, workflows, or best practices, you can leave a comment here, or ask a question in the Community area.