# Summary In the short-to-medium term, GitLab Spaces aims to introduce new functionality that extends and elevates group owner permissions, enables more granular provisioning and access control over users, projects, repositories and teams and improves overall customer privacy and security. Spaces will also allow us to build rich and useful administrative features that extend to both SaaS and Self-Managed customers, rather than only for Self-Managed. In the long term, what we hope to achieve is a feature-rich integrated platform, or "Space", within GitLab that allows teams (and possibly also entire organisations) to communicate and collaborate effectively above and across many groups and projects. Some ideas of what this could look like includes features such as Team activity feeds; Workspace level epics and issues; Full and autonomous user management and unified access control; Strong privacy features and autonomous data protection; Productivity highlights and hotspots in your organisation; Configurable and informative dashboards; A blog platform; Scheduling; Integrated chat functionality and more. The goal is to move even further towards a single application by enriching the user experience in such a way that you never need to leave GitLab to get the job done. For the moment, this research work has been paused to work on a more urgent/important [MVC towards better isolation](https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/2777) on GitLab.com for our SaaS customers (which is a building block towards Spaces) and we will revisit this again in a few months. The goal of this epic is to work on the problem validation, design and solution validation phases of the [product development flow](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product-development-flow/). * Stage: ~"devops::manage" * Group: ~"group::spaces" * Stage Group Manager: @jeremy * Product Manager: @tipyn * UX Researcher: @katokpara * Product Designer: @amandakhughes * Engineering Manager: @lmcandrew * Frontend Engineering Manager: @dennis ## Phase 1 - [Complete](https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/2447) * Phase: ~"workflow::problem validation" * Milestone: %"12.8" * Due date: 17th Feb 2020 * Opportunity canvas: [link](https://docs.google.com/document/d/19E2EBnIJowyi2Es6AZTBMONWEYqqaREbDUPUyrwyNJw/edit#) ## Phase 2 * Phase: ~"workflow::design" * Milestone: TBD * Due date:TBD ## Phase 3 * Phase: ~"workflow::solution validation" * Milestone: TBD * Due date: TBD