Managing workspaces

Overview

A workspace houses topics going through the same workflow — the stages that a topic goes through from start until finish. They're great for:

• Separating the work of different teams, to keep clutter to a minimum for everyone.

• Separating work that moves through different workflows. For instance, a marketing team might have one workspace for ad campaigns and another one for website content. Even though the same people work on both, those two kinds of work have different life cycles so it’s useful to track their progress separately.

• Keeping sensitive or confidential topics private to a subset of your organization (via private workspaces)

Step-by-step

Creating a workspace

To create a new workspace, just hover over “Workspaces” in the sidebar, click the “+” button and enter a name. We recommend keeping it short (~30 characters or less).

When you create a workspace, it's prepopulated with a default sequence of stages and configured based on your organization's defaults. To edit a workspace's stages or change its configuration, just click the workspace's name to open the Workspace setup dialog.

Renaming a workspace

To rename an existing workspace, just visit the workspace and click its name to open the Workspace setup dialog. We recommend keeping workspace names short (~30 characters or less).

Controlling workspace access

See Workspace visibility.

Configuring workspace options

Every Flat workspace has optional features that you can turn on or off as needed. Don't feel obligated to use them just because they're there! Turn them on only if they're helpful for your team's work style. Otherwise, leave them off to reduce clutter.

To configure a workspace's options, just click the workspace's name to open the Workspace setup dialog, then visit the Options tab.

There are three options:

• Due dates: Turn it on to track when topics or tasks are due. Learn more at Due dates.

• Sizes/estimates: Turn it on track or estimate how much work a topic is expected to entail. Learn more at Topic sizing.

• Software development: For engineering teams, turn it on to allow pull requests to be automatically linked to topics. This option will only be visible if your organization has integrated with GitHub. Learn more at GitHub.

To configure the initial default options that new workspaces start with, visit Admin Settings | General.

Changes a workspace's stages

See Workflow stages.

Archiving or unarchiving a workspace

To archive a workspace that your team no longer needs, just click the workspace's name to open the Workspace setup dialog, visit the Visibiility tab, and click the button to archive it.

Archived workspaces no longer appear in the navigation bar, and their topics no longer appear in search. However, you can still view an archived workspace and its topics if you visit them via a direct link.