The workspace was designed to walk the user through a workflow of building complex objects in VMware's VROps, such as reports, alert definitions, and dashboards. It has been describes as a wizard on steroids due to its ability to take the concepts of a wizard and address common issues that come up when trying to use a wizard to create complex objects.
The workspace modeler is broken up into three main components:
The workflow / tool pallet - Designed to guide the user through a workflow while at the same time not forcing them into a strictly linear path.
The Canvas - The main working area. Users can drag and drop elements from different sections of the workflow/tool pallet into the canvas. When elements have been placed on the canvas the user can interact and configure them directly.
The Help Drawer - Provides the user with help that is more contextual than just describing the object being built. The help drawer is contextual to each step of the work flow, describing the important concepts for each step in the workflow. When the user is comfortable with the concepts around building a given object type the help drawer can be closed until the next time they need it.