Folders in Ellie serve as containers that allow you to group models and glossaries systematically. Unlike the previous tag-based Collections, Folders support a multi-level hierarchy, enabling the creation of subfolders to mirror your organization's structure or project needs.
Video overview of the functionality - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_y_Ex0PULo
Hierarchical Organization: Create nested folders to represent various domains, projects, or departments, facilitating intuitive navigation and management.
Dedicated Sub-glossaries: Each folder can have its own glossary, known as a sub-glossary, allowing for domain-specific definitions while maintaining access to the organization-wide glossaries.
Access Control: Set permissions at the folder level to control who can edit the contents, ensuring security and proper governance.
Organization Folder: is the central workspace in Ellie where all shared assets are stored and managed. It serves as the main repository accessible to the entire organization.
Subfolders: are nested folders within the Organization Folder or other subfolders, enabling a hierarchical structure that aligns with specific domains, projects, or departments. Each subfolder can have its own sub-glossary for domain-specific terms while still allowing access to organization-wide glossaries. Permissions are inherited from parent folders but can be customized as needed. By default each folder has its own glossary enabled.
Personal folder: is a private space for individual users to draft, experiment, and refine models before sharing them with the broader organization. Users can copy assets from public folders, work on them privately, and publish finalized versions to public folders. Additionally, assets in the Personal Folder can be shared with admins or write-access users for review and publishing on the user's behalf.
Ellie 7.0 introduces new concepts that reshaped your Ellie organization. Some of your assets had to be migrated to fit into our new folder system.
This guide will explain what has changed and how to use the new features.
Note: an asset is generic term for a model or a conceptual entity. In some cases a folder can be considered an asset.
All collections have been replaced by folders. You can no longer create collections but instead use the new folders structure. The main difference is that collections could only contain models. A folder can contain all type of assets: models, conceptual entities and sub-folders. Folders enable nested structures.
The new folder concept forces every assets to be part of a folder. Also, an asset can belong to only one folder.
To do so, a new folder has been created at the root of your Ellie environment called Organization.
Here is how existing assets have been migrated:
All the models that were not in a collection have been moved to the Organization folder.
All your collections have been upgraded to a folders and moved to the Organization folder.
All the entities of your organization glossary have also been moved to the Organization folder.
Note: Personal collections are still private and not included in the Organization folder.
All assets contained in the Organization folder tree are called public assets and are visible by all users.
Folders can now have their own conceptual entities. The subset of all the entities of a folder is called a glossary. A folder can only have one glossary.
Example:
We have a folder called Sales.
The folder Sales contains 2 entities: Customer and Product.
It is valid to say:
Customer is from the Sales glossary
Entity Customer is from the Sales folder
Customer and Product constitute the Sales glossary
Personal collections have also been upgraded to personal folders, with the exception that you cannot create sub-folders in your personal folder.
Conceptual entities of your personal folder constitute your personal glossary.
All assets contained in your personal folder are called personal assets and are private.
As a new feature, you can also directly use public entities in your personal models. Before, you had to make a copy of the public entity to your personal glossary.
Personal entities cannot be used in public models. Use Publish first.
You can share a personal asset with a link, write users will have edit rights.
You can configure the edit rights of your folder in the permission tab.
As a user, in a folder, you can be either:
an editor:
You can edit the folder
Name, description
Suggested glossaries
Permissions
You can create, edit, move, copy or share assets
or a restricted user:
The folder and its assets are read only
You cannot create, edit or move assets
You can copy, view or share assets
To define these role, you can choose one of 3 permission modes for the folder:
Open: All users are editors of the folder.
Restricted: Limits edit rights to selected users.
Editors: Specify users with editor privilege within the folder. Editors can also change the folder’s permissions and settings. Admins are always included in the editors.
Inherit (default): Inherits permission settings from the parent folder.
Note: if the parent folder’s permission settings are updated, the folder will inherit from the new settings.
In the Glossary tab, you can customize glossary settings for the folder.
These features are for conceptual models and the other levels are unaffected.
If enabled (default):
You can create new entities to your folder and define its glossary.
If disabled:
Folder has no glossary
Prevent entities to be created or moved to the folder.
The folder will only have models and sub-folders.
When modeling:
you cannot create new entities from the model
you can only use existing entities from other glossaries
if you want to create a new entity, you need to create it first in another glossary.
You can promote certain glossaries and encourage users to reuse terms from those glossaries.
The suggested glossaries will appear first when searching for entities in conceptual model.
If you want to restrict entity suggestions strictly to the selected glossaries. This limits the entities shown in the Search or Create bar when modeling in this folder.
if enabled:
User can only use entities from own glossary or suggested glossaries.
Other glossaries will be hidden.
if disabled (default):
User can use all public entities.
This feature is exclusive to conceptual models.
Glossaries are not meant to be exclusive to their folder. Instead, it is encouraged to reuse entities across different folders. An entity borrowed from an other glossary is called a foreign entity.
A foreign entity is not a copy, it is a reference to an entity from a foreign glossary.
As a consequence:
If a foreign entity is modified, the changes are directly brought to the original entity.
If an entity is modified, all foreign usage of that entity will be updated.
If you wish to update a foreign entity exclusively to your current folder (we call it specializing), use the Clone feature. It will replace the foreign entity with a new copy in your current glossary.
Any model or entity can by copied to your personal folder.
This can be useful for 2 reasons:
If you want to work on an asset without polluting it with work in progress.
Copy it to your personal folder
Make the updates
Publish it to the public folder
If you cannot edit an asset and want to suggest modification.
Copy it to your personal folder
Make the updates
Share your personal copy to an editor of the public asset
The editor can then review it and publish it to the public folder
Note:
About copying a conceptual model to your personal folder:
the entities are not replaced with personal copies
the model will keep the public entities as foreign entities
You can publish personal asset to a public folder.
There is 2 cases for Publish:
Your asset is an original creation, then you can select a destination folder.
Your asset is a copy of a public asset, then the publish flow is simplified to directly overwrite the public asset with your personal changes.
For more control, you can use the normal Copy feature.
Notes:
Copying a conceptual model to a public folder:
the personal entities are either:
replaced with a public homonym from the destination folder
if there is no homonym in the destination folder, then the personal entity is also published to the destination folder.
the foreign public entities do not need special action and are simply kept as is.
A published asset is simply a copy, so updating the public or personal asset will not propagate the changes to the other.
In some cases not all entities have been move to the Organization folder.
If your organization was making use of restricted collections, the entities used in restricted models have also been moved to their respective restricted folder.
If you have any questions about this functionality, please, reach out to support@ellie.ai.