Oak has seven area types: Business, Region, Office, Department, Project, Team and Folder.
The differences between them are mainly conceptual. Each can help you structure your intranet around different audiences, locations, functions or types of work. However, the area types are not completely interchangeable, as certain types can only be nested within others.
- Business – the top-level area, typically representing your parent organisation. Businesses can contain other Businesses, as well as Regions, Offices, Departments, Projects, Teams and Folders.
- Region – typically represents a geographical or regional grouping that may contain several different offices.
- Office – represents a physical location. Offices are created automatically when user data is imported, as Office is a mandatory user field.
- Department – represents a functional area of the organisation, such as Finance or HR.
- Project – represents a specific, usually time-limited piece of work.
- Team – represents a group of users, which may be based on location, function, project or role.
- Folder – the lowest level of area, used to organise content. Folders cannot have members, so users cannot be assigned directly to them.
Top tip: Areas can have the same name if they exist in different parts of your structure. However, we recommend using unique names for areas such as Offices and Departments where possible, as duplicate names can cause issues with imports from systems such as Entra ID (previously Active Directory).