Within the workspace are projects, which are containers for source and binary files (together with some configuration files). Before you perform any development or debugging work in the IDE, you must first create projects to store your code.
Projects can be shared between users using a version control system. Projects themselves are flat; one project cannot contain another one. However, there is a concept of a working set, which lets you filter and group projects within a workspace. There is also a QNX Container project type, which lets you control or build sets of projects at the same time.
The workspace directory should never be included as part of a revision control system shared between users, nor should it be located on a shared drive (unless you're certain that there will only ever be one person using it).
The frequent and large-scale development cycles in workspace metadata may cause poor performance on network filesystems, particularly with large workspaces.
For projects, you need to have a directory in the filesystem that contains the project root (which stores source and build output) as well as the project metadata. If you want to separate the metadata from the source directories, you have to use linked folders. You have an option to include the project inside or outside your workspace. You can determine how to create the project directory; you can check out the top level from one location and subdirectories from another location, or you can use OS soft links or some other means to create it.