Spaces and Assets

Spaces and Assets form the foundation of how you work with Athena. Spaces provides a dynamic, flexible workspace where you can interact with multiple assets simultaneously, while Assets encompass all the files, documents, and data you work with—whether stored directly in Athena or connected from external sources.

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What is Spaces?

Athena Spaces is a dynamic workspace that transforms the way you interact with multiple assets simultaneously. This innovative workspace empowers you to create, organize, and manipulate your work environment with unprecedented flexibility and efficiency. With Spaces, you can effortlessly drag-and-drop various components, creating a personalized, adaptive workspace that suits your unique workflow. Spaces is not just another application—it’s the central nervous system of your Athena experience, integrating seamlessly with all 19+ applications, your data sources, and Athena’s AI capabilities.

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The Spaces Sidebar: Your File Directory View

The workspace structure on the left side of your Spaces view provides a comprehensive framework for managing your professional activities and information resources. This sidebar is your primary navigation tool, giving you instant access to all your work. The sidebar is divided into two main categories:

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Sessions

Sessions represent active work instances and communication tools. This section includes: Conversations: Contains all the historical conversations you have had with Athena. Each conversation maintains its context, allowing you to return to previous discussions and continue where you left off. Emails: Shows your latest emails and email threads when you have email integration enabled. Access and manage your email communications directly within Athena. Meetings: Displays your meeting recordings and transcripts, making it easy to reference past discussions and extract insights from recorded sessions. You can create new sessions by clicking on the ’+’ icon beside Sessions.

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Assets

Assets represent your document management and organizational features. This is where all your content lives: Recents: Shows the most recent assets you’ve worked with, providing quick access to your active files and documents. Task Inbox: Displays a list of all tasks created by you or Athena, helping you stay organized and track your work items. Catalogs: Shows your connected data sources from external providers like SharePoint, Google Drive, Gmail, Salesforce, and more. This is where Live Assets appear. Drive: A comprehensive collection of all the assets in your workspace, organized in a hierarchical folder structure similar to traditional file systems. You can upload or create new assets by clicking on the ’+’ icon beside Assets.

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Understanding Assets

Assets are the building blocks of your work in Athena. An asset can be any file, document, or resource that you work with—from documents and spreadsheets to emails, meeting recordings, and data from external sources.

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Types of Assets

Athena supports a wide variety of asset types: Documents: Text files, PDFs, Word documents, markdown files, and other text-based content Spreadsheets: Excel files, CSV files, and Athena Sheets for data analysis and manipulation Presentations: PowerPoint files and Athena Presentations for creating slide decks Media Files: Videos, audio files, and images for multimedia content Code & Notebooks: Jupyter notebooks, code files, and development resources Emails: Email messages and threads from connected email accounts Meetings: Meeting recordings, transcripts, and associated materials Browse Sessions: Saved web browsing sessions and research Canvases: Visual collaboration boards and diagrams

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Regular Assets vs Live Assets

Understanding the distinction between regular assets and Live Assets is crucial for effective workflow management:

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Regular Assets

Regular assets are files that you upload directly to Athena:

• Uploaded directly to Athena’s secure storage
• Processed and converted by Athena (PDF conversion, embedding generation, etc.)
• Static content that doesn’t change unless explicitly updated
• Permanently stored with dedicated storage keys
• Full control over versioning and modifications

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Live Assets

Live Assets are external files and folders from third-party providers that are dynamically integrated into Athena, providing real-time access to your organization’s data without requiring migration or duplication. Unlike traditional assets that are uploaded and stored within Athena, Live Assets remain in their original systems—such as SharePoint sites, Gmail inboxes, Google Drive folders, and other enterprise platforms—and are accessed on-demand through secure API connections. Key characteristics of Live Assets:

• Remain in external provider systems (SharePoint, Gmail, Google Drive, etc.)
• Accessed via provider APIs using secure authentication
• Dynamic content that reflects the real-time state of external files
• Fetched on-demand with intelligent caching for performance
• Require provider-specific authentication and credentials
• No data duplication—files stay in their original location

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Connecting to Data Sources

One of Spaces’ most powerful features is its ability to connect to external data sources, bringing all your organization’s information into one unified interface.

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The Catalog System

Live Assets are organized through a Catalog-based architecture: Catalog Asset: Represents your connection to an external provider (e.g., a specific SharePoint site or Gmail account)

• Contains provider metadata and connection settings
• Acts as the parent container for all assets from that provider
• Manages authentication credentials securely
• Appears in your workspace’s Catalogs section in Spaces

Live Assets: Individual files, folders, emails, or records within the catalog

• Referenced using unique compound IDs that link to both the catalog and external resource
• Can be files (rendered in viewers) or folders (navigable in Drive view)
• Accessible through search, mentions, and direct navigation

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Supported Data Sources

Athena supports Live Assets from multiple enterprise platforms, enabling unified access to your organization’s distributed knowledge:

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Connecting External Providers

To connect external data sources and create Live Asset catalogs:

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Uploading Files and Folders

You can directly import your data into Athena by uploading files and folders from your computer.

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Uploading Individual Files

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Uploading Folders with Structure Preserved

Import a folder to Athena while preserving the complete directory structure:

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Key Features of Spaces

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Drag-and-Drop Interface

Effortlessly arrange and reorganize your workspace components using an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, allowing for quick adjustments and customization of your work environment.

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Customizable Panels

Tailor panels and components to your specific needs, enabling you to design a workspace that aligns perfectly with your workflow and preferences.

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AI-Powered Interaction

Leverage Athena’s intelligence through the sidebar Chat to interact with your documents, ask questions, and gain insights without leaving your workspace.

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Multi-Asset Support

Work with a diverse range of assets simultaneously, from documents and spreadsheets to images and browse sessions, all within a single, cohesive environment.

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Configuring Athena in Spaces

Spaces provides powerful customization options for how Athena interacts with your assets through agent configuration. You can tailor Athena’s behavior, capabilities, and intelligence by selecting the right combination of persona, toolkits, and AI model.

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Choosing Your Agent Persona

Athena offers different personas that determine her behavior and capabilities: Chat: Read-only mode for asking questions and getting information without making changes to your assets. Use this when you want to explore and understand content without any modifications. Assist: Read-write mode where Athena can actively modify and create content. This persona enables Athena to edit documents, update spreadsheets, send emails, and perform other operations that change your assets. Deep Think: Multi-agent reasoning mode for complex analytical tasks. This advanced persona uses multiple AI agents working together to break down complex problems and provide thorough analysis. To select a persona:

• Click the persona dropdown in the chat interface (usually located near the top of the sidebar)
• Choose the mode that best fits your current task
• The selected persona will determine what actions Athena can take with your assets

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Configuring Toolkits

Toolkits give Athena access to specific capabilities and operations. You can enable or disable toolkits based on your current needs:

• Document Toolkit: Work with text documents and PDFs - read, edit, create, and analyze document content
• Spreadsheet Toolkit: Analyze and manipulate data in sheets - perform calculations, create charts, and manage tabular data
• Email Toolkit: Draft, send, and manage emails through your connected email accounts
• Browse Toolkit: Search the web and extract information from websites
• Notebook Toolkit: Run data analysis in Jupyter notebooks with Python code execution
• VM Toolkit: Execute code in a virtual machine environment for advanced automation
• App Toolkit: Interact with user interfaces and applications programmatically

To configure toolkits:

1. Click the toolkit selector in the chat interface (typically displayed as a grid or list icon)
2. Review the available toolkits - each is represented with an icon and name
3. Click on individual toolkits to enable or disable them
4. Enabled toolkits will be highlighted (usually in blue or with a checkmark)
5. You can enable multiple toolkits simultaneously to give Athena a broader range of capabilities

Best practices:

• Enable only the toolkits you need for better performance and more focused responses
• For document-heavy work, enable Document and Spreadsheet toolkits
• For research tasks, enable Browse and Document toolkits
• For automation tasks, consider enabling VM and App toolkits

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Selecting a Model

Choose from recommended AI models or browse all available options to find the right balance of capability and performance: To select a model:

1. Click the model selector dropdown (typically showing the current model name like “GPT-4” or “Claude”)
2. Browse the Recommended section for models optimized for common tasks
3. Or scroll to view the complete list of available models including specialized options
4. Click on a model to select it
5. Admin users have access to additional experimental and advanced models in the admin section

Model categories:

• Recommended Models: Optimized for general use cases with good balance of performance and cost
• All Models: Complete list including specialized models for specific tasks
• Admin Models (admin only): Experimental and cutting-edge models for testing and advanced use cases

The model selection affects Athena’s reasoning capability, response quality, and processing speed. Choose based on your task complexity and requirements.

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Working with Multiple Assets

Spaces excels at managing multiple assets simultaneously in a flexible, multi-pane view that adapts to your workflow. This powerful feature allows you to reference information across assets, perform comparative analysis, and maintain context across different types of content.

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Opening Multiple Assets

You can open various asset types together in Spaces to create a comprehensive workspace: To open assets:

1. Browse the sidebar on the left side of Spaces
2. Navigate through the Assets section to find documents, spreadsheets, emails, browse sessions, and other content
3. Click on any asset to open it in the main Spaces view
4. Each asset opens in its own pane within the workspace
5. Continue clicking additional assets to add more panes to your workspace

Asset types you can open simultaneously:

• Documents (text files, PDFs, markdown files)
• Spreadsheets (data tables, analysis sheets)
• Emails (individual messages or threads)
• Browse sessions (web pages and research)
• Meetings (recordings and transcripts)
• Notebooks (Jupyter notebooks with code and output)
• Canvases (visual collaboration boards)

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Arranging Your Workspace

Customize your layout with intuitive drag-and-drop functionality: Rearranging panes:

1. Drag tabs - Click and hold on an asset’s tab (at the top of its pane) and drag it to reposition
2. Drop on edges - As you drag, drop zones will appear on the edges of existing panes
3. Create layouts - Drop on the left/right edge for side-by-side layout, or top/bottom edge for stacked layout
4. Resize panes - Hover over the divider between panes until you see the resize cursor, then click and drag to adjust pane sizes
5. Close tabs - Click the ‘X’ button on a tab or right-click and select “Close Tab” when you’re done with an asset

Layout possibilities:

• Side-by-side: Compare two documents or reference one while editing another
• Grid layout: View 3-4 assets simultaneously in a grid pattern
• Main + sidebar: Large pane for primary work with smaller reference panes on the side
• Stacked: Vertical arrangement for viewing multiple assets in sequence

The multi-pane view is fully persistent - Spaces remembers your layout, so you can return to the same workspace configuration later.

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Athena’s Multi-Asset Awareness

When you have multiple assets open in Spaces, Athena becomes aware of all visible content and can:

• Reference all visible assets in her responses without needing to explicitly mention each one
• Cross-reference information between documents - for example, pulling data from a spreadsheet while writing a document
• Apply insights from one asset to another - such as using research from a browse session to update a report
• Perform comparative analysis across datasets - comparing different spreadsheets or document versions
• Execute coordinated actions across multiple assets - like creating a summary document based on multiple source materials

To leverage multi-asset awareness:

• Simply ask Athena questions that involve multiple assets: “Compare the revenue figures in both spreadsheets”
• Use @ mentions to reference specific assets explicitly: “Use the data from @Q4-Report to update @Annual-Summary”
• Ask for operations across assets: “Create a summary document based on all open meeting transcripts”
• Request analysis: “What are the common themes across these three documents?”

Athena automatically considers the context of all open assets when formulating responses, making it easy to work across multiple sources of information without switching contexts.

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Context Menu Options

Right-click on any asset in Spaces to access a comprehensive context menu with powerful operations. This menu provides quick access to common actions without interrupting your workflow.

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Available Actions

The context menu offers a variety of operations for managing and working with your assets: Information & Navigation:

• Details: View detailed metadata, properties, and information about the selected asset including creation date, last modified, owner, and file size
• Find in Asset Tree: Quickly locate the asset in the sidebar file structure, useful when you have many assets and need to see where something is organized

AI & Knowledge:

• Ask in chat: Open a focused conversation about the selected asset with Athena, bringing the asset into context automatically
• Add to Knowledge Base: Include this asset in the agent’s long-term knowledge, allowing Athena to reference it across different sessions and conversations
• Add to Workbench: Add the asset to the current project context for focused work, making it part of your active working set
• Ingest to Knowledge Graph: Process the asset for semantic search and relationship mapping, enabling advanced queries and connections

Organization:

• Add to Collection: Organize assets into custom collections for better categorization and grouping
• Link to Project: Associate the asset with a specific project, making it easier to find related work
• Move: Relocate the asset to a different folder in your workspace organization

Sharing & Collaboration:

• Copy Link: Copy a shareable link to the asset that you can send to workspace members
• Share: Open sharing options to share the asset with workspace members or generate public links with configurable permissions
• Duplicate: Create a copy of the asset, useful for creating templates or preserving versions

Workspace Management:

• Close Tab: Close the asset from the current Spaces view without deleting it
• Delete: Remove the asset permanently from your workspace (with confirmation prompt to prevent accidental deletion)

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Using the Context Menu

To access the context menu:

1. Right-click on any asset tab in your Spaces workspace
2. Or right-click on an asset in the sidebar
3. Select the desired action from the menu

Tips:

• The available options may vary based on the asset type and your permissions
• Keyboard shortcuts are displayed next to menu items when available
• Some actions (like Delete) will prompt for confirmation before executing
• Admin users may see additional options for managing workspace-level settings

The context menu is designed to keep you in flow - you can perform most asset operations without leaving Spaces or opening separate dialogs.

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Organizing Your Assets

Athena provides three powerful systems for organizing and managing your data: Folders, Collections, and Catalogs.

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Folders

Folders in Athena provide a hierarchical structure for organizing your assets, similar to traditional file systems. They support parent-child relationships, allowing you to create nested folder structures that match your organizational needs. Key Features:

• Hierarchical Organization: Create nested folder structures to organize assets logically
• User Sandbox: Each user has a protected sandbox folder (sandbox/{username}/) for personal assets
• Sharing & Permissions: Control who can view and edit folder contents
• Asset Management: Move assets between folders with drag-and-drop or bulk operations

Creating Folders:

1. Navigate to Spaces and find the location where you want to create a folder
2. Click the + icon and select New Folder from the menu
3. Give your folder a descriptive name
4. Drag and drop assets into your folder, or use the context menu to move multiple assets at once

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Collections

Collections allow you to group related assets together without changing their folder location. Think of collections as custom tags or playlists for your assets - an asset can belong to multiple collections while remaining in its original folder. Key Features:

• Asset Grouping: Combine assets from different folders into a single view
• Descriptions: Add rich text descriptions to document the collection’s purpose
• Dynamic Membership: Easily add or remove assets without affecting their original locations
• Multiple Collections: Assets can belong to multiple collections simultaneously

Creating Collections:

1. From Spaces, click the + icon and select New Collection
2. Give your collection a meaningful name and add a description explaining its purpose or contents
3. Click Add Assets to select items from your workspace
4. View and interact with all assets in the collection

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Catalogs

Catalogs provide connections to external data sources, enabling you to access data without importing it into Athena. There are two types of catalogs: Database Catalogs for structured data sources and Live Asset Catalogs for external file providers. Database Catalogs connect to structured data sources like Trino, Dremio, Snowflake, BigQuery, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or other SQL databases. They provide a hierarchical view of your data: Catalog → Schema → Table → Columns. Live Asset Catalogs connect to external providers like SharePoint, Google Drive, Gmail, and ServiceNow. They enable you to access and work with files that remain in their original locations.

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Use Cases for Spaces and Assets

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Knowledge Management

Access company documents stored in SharePoint or Google Drive without migrating them to Athena:

• Maintain a single source of truth in your existing document management system
• Search across all connected catalogs from Athena’s unified search interface
• Reference documents in conversations with Athena agents
• Generate summaries and insights from external files without manual uploads

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Real-Time Collaboration

Work with live folder contents that reflect current state:

• Browse SharePoint libraries and Google Drive folders with up-to-date file listings
• Access the latest versions of documents automatically
• Collaborate on external files while using Athena’s AI capabilities
• Share live asset links with team members

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Cross-Platform Integration

Bring external content into Athena workflows:

• Link Gmail threads to Projects for context and tracking
• Reference Salesforce records in agent workflows
• Include Notion pages in Athena Spaces layouts
• Search across Slack messages, Jira issues, and emails simultaneously

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Unified Interface

Manage both internal and external content through a single interface:

• View Live Assets alongside uploaded files in Spaces
• Search finds results from both regular assets and connected providers
• Use @ mentions to reference live assets in conversations
• Apply the same organizational structures (tags, folders, projects) to all asset types

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Integration with Other Athena Features

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Projects

Link assets to Projects for comprehensive context:

• Associate external files with project initiatives
• Track changes in connected documents
• Generate project reports that include live asset data
• Maintain relationships between Athena assets and external resources

Learn more about Projects.

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Agents and Automation

Leverage assets in agent workflows and automation:

• Agents can search across connected catalogs
• Reference live assets in Agent Operating Procedures (AOPs)
• Automate workflows that process external files
• Generate insights from live data sources

Learn more about Agents and Task Studio.

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Search and Discovery

Assets are fully integrated into Athena’s search capabilities:

• Unified search across all connected catalogs
• Filter results by provider, file type, or date
• Quick Actions available on all asset search results
• Citation and reference support in documents

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Additional Resources