A work area is a special type of folder in ProjectWise Explorer that provides a single place to manage and organize documents, data, and resources related to a given real-world project. A work area contains content specific to a project such as: saved searches, documents, sub-folders, other work areas, components, links to other sources of data, and so on. It is distinguished from a regular folder because it give the administrator more granular controls over that work area. Administrators can apply specific views, environments, workspaces, and applications to a work area. There can also be user roles specific to a work area. There is even project specific metadata that can be assigned to a work area.
To upgrade a folder to a work area, special permissions are required and are set in the ProjectWise Administrator module. If the user has the necessary permissions, when they right click on a folder in ProjectWise Explorer, the option to "Upgrade to work area" will be available. This wizard will prompt you to set the data specific to this work area. The wizard also lets you associate the work area in ProjectWise Explorer to your ProjectWise Project. Once the work area and ProjectWise project are mapped together, the ProjectWise cloud services are available for this project and can be accessed right from ProjectWise Explorer.
For more information on how to configure a ProjectWise work area and to see the features that are available in the rich folder please visit docs.bentley.com or click here.