Today, you may be using Atlas (fka Team Central) as the tool for communicating the status of projects & goals and maybe some of you have discovered how amazing the new people & teams features are, but that’s just the start of Team Central’s vision. Enter the Help Directory .
Help directory is for ANY team that provides or needs help (aka #alltheteams) because it acts as an aggregator of any kind of help provided across your organization. Think of it as your first stop to point people to the services you provide (help providers) or quickly find any kind of help you’re looking for (help seekers).
Just like projects, we believe many teams in an organisation should have the freedom to choose whatever tool best suits their help workflows. Even at Atlassian, we use a wide range of help solutions: some teams use JSM, others use Halp, Trello boards, Slack channels and even Confluence FAQ pages to track requests.
Because teams provide and look for help in SO many different places, it’s easy to get lost, give up and default to pinging your managers or friendly colleagues to see if they know where you can find the right help source. We believe Atlas’ help directory will free users from disruptive pings by giving everyone a one-stop shop to aggregate and discover #allthehelp solutions across the org.
Because help and projects go hand in hand. You have Atlas projects & goals and Atlas people & teams, and in order to move work forward, teams need to collaborate and help each other.
We aim to aggregate JSM with your other request management tooling so it's easy for help seekers to find whatever they need from one point.
Our first version of the Help Directory provides a central catalogue to broadcast and find how teams can offer help. Whether it’s which feedback mechanism a product team is using, the Slack help channel for reporting bugs or that request form for marketing assets, you should be able to come to the Help Directory and easily find what you need to move work forward.
Head to your Atlas Help Directory and you’ll be able to:
Teams can broadcast their various help sources, alongside their projects & goals from their own team profiles or on the Help Directory.
Our first cut of help directory is built through manual help links. Yep, we know it would be awesome to populate help links automagically and we’ll get to that - but for now, we’re enabling the foundations to create and display help.
Easily find how to reach out for help from different teams across your company. You’ll be able to see help grouped by teams, the type of help they provide and click straight into it.
The directory search will then match your keywords on title, description, team and tags for each of these help links to surface the most relevant results to you.
Encourage your teams to hop into the Atlas Help Directory today and take 5 minutes to share the primary places for reaching out to them for help. Some useful ways of identifying whether you should create a help link would be:
💖 Are you often asked the same question multiple times? Tired of the 1:1 pings? Start by creating a help link on your team’s profile and link people to your team page for future questions.
💖 Are teams pinging you for help that’s actually meant for another team? Re-route those distractions by creating a help link for the right team.
💖 Forgot the name of that request form you needed to use? So, you may need to ask the team but once you find out, encourage them to broadcast it with Help Directory! Most likely, others will need it in the future as well and now you’ve just saved them a bunch of time.
If you’re interested in being an early adopter on the Help Directory, getting a sneak peek of the next features and working closely with our product team to define how we best connect teams with the right help, then shoot us an email at rlin2@atlassian.com and we’d love to set up some time to chat.
Rachel Lin
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