Skip to content

Workspace Transfer

Workspace Transfer (Admin → Settings → Migration → Workspace Transfer) moves an entire Turbo EA workspace from one instance to another as a single, self-contained bundle. The driving use case: you build out a workspace on a local instance and need to promote everything to Production.

Workspace Transfer

What's included

The export captures the full workspace as a .zip bundle containing one Excel workbook (all structured data, one sheet per domain) and, where relevant, an assets/ folder for unstructured files:

  • Metamodel — card types and relation types, including all custom fields, subtypes, sections, and translations.
  • Configuration — roles, per-type stakeholder roles, tag groups and tags, calculated fields, EA principles, and compliance regulations.
  • Settings — currency, date format, feature flags, login branding, enabled locales, and the rest of the general application settings.
  • Users — email, display name, role, and active flag (used to re-link ownership and assignments on the target). No passwords or SSO identities.
  • Inventory — every card (with its hierarchy, lifecycle, and attributes), card tags, and relations.
  • Card context — stakeholders, document links, comments, todos, and file attachments.
  • Module data — BPM (process diagrams, elements, flow versions, assessments), PPM (status reports, costs, budgets, risks, tasks, WBS, dependencies), the GRC risk register (risks, mitigation tasks and occurrences, card links), architecture decisions and Statements of Architecture Work, free-draw diagrams, saved reports, bookmarks, web portals, and surveys.
  • Assets — binary file attachments, diagram and BPMN XML, and the logo/favicon travel as separate files inside the bundle's assets/ folder.

What's never included

For security, secrets are never exported:

  • SMTP password
  • SSO client secret
  • AI provider API key
  • ServiceNow credentials

You must re-enter these on the target instance after importing. This is unavoidable by design: encrypted values are tied to the source instance's SECRET_KEY and cannot be decrypted anywhere else.

Exporting

  1. Open Admin → Settings → Migration → Workspace Transfer.
  2. (Optional) tick Include archived cards to add archived inventory to the bundle.
  3. Click Export bundle. Your browser downloads workspace_export_<timestamp>.zip.

Importing

  1. On the target instance, open Admin → Settings → Migration → Workspace Transfer.
  2. Under Import workspace, click Choose bundle… and select the .zip you exported.
  3. Turbo EA parses the bundle and shows a dry-run preview — a per-section table of how many entities would be created, updated, skipped, or are in conflict. Nothing is written yet.
  4. Review the preview, then click Apply import.

Import is idempotent: metamodel and configuration are matched by key, cards by external id or by type + hierarchy path, and users by email. Re-importing the same bundle is safe — already-present entities are skipped rather than duplicated. Existing built-in metamodel types keep their identity; only their editable schema is merged.

After importing

  • Re-enter any SMTP, SSO, and AI credentials under their respective settings tabs.
  • Synthetic users referenced by the bundle are created deactivated; activate them under Admin → Users as needed.

Permissions

Workspace Transfer is gated by two dedicated permissions, both granted to administrators:

  • admin.export_workspace — export the bundle.
  • admin.import_workspace — preview and apply an import.