The new Topics Homepage: Use topics to curate your work, teams, and knowledge

[#1]

Hi everyone,

It's Rachel here - I'm a product manager on the Atlas team. I'm excited to announce an exciting new experience in Atlas, with topics!

You'll now see Topics in your navigation menu, as a way to browse all the topics in your Atlas workspace and clicking into them will take you into a magic wonderland of all the work, teams and knowledge associated with that topic. Read on to find out more about our new topic homepages.

---

One thing we've learned from talking to and observing how thousands of different teams work is that 💡 different audiences have different needs when it comes to communicating about work.

Someone highly dependent on a project may want the details of what happened last week, whereas someone further from the work may want to understand how it fits in relation to other projects in the same space.

To deliver the right granularity of information, Atlas has different ways of grouping work so that it can be more contextual to each audience. One way to do this is through tagging with topics to curate work. Here’s what you’ll unlock through the power of topics.

View work, knowledge, updates and teams by topic

Every topic in Atlas has its own homepage where you can see what work is happening, who’s working on it, what knowledge they’ve gathered and how it’s all going.

It all starts from the Topic Directory, where you can browse all topics in your workspace. Alternatively, you can click through any topic added to a project, goal, help link or question.

How to create a topic

When you tag a project, goal, question, or help link in Atlas a topic is created its homepage is automatically generated, aggregating all relevant work, knowledge, and team that have been tagged with that topic.

Exploring a topic

Projects and goals

Projects and goals shows an overview of the work happening within a topic and how it’s tracking, so you can quickly dig into whatever needs attention.

Help and knowledge

Help and knowledge curates learnings from projects, help links and questions about a topic making it easier to share and consume knowledge built up across the organisation.

Updates

The updates tab shows updates for all the projects and goals tagged with this topic, so you can catch up and celebrate progress.

People & teams

People and teams who are contributing the most on work within a topic area will be highlighted on the right panel, to celebrate their expertise but also provide a community of relevant experts to speak to.

Follow topics you’re interested in

What happens once you’ve followed a topic? You’ll now receive updates from any projects and goals, help or knowledge tagged with that topic. You’ll also be able to quickly access the topic feed from your Home screen. Learn more here.

FAQ

How do I manage and curate topics in my workspace?

Add topics by tagging projects, goals, questions, and help links in Atlas. Once a topic has been created, any Atlas user can contribute to the knowledge in a topic by creating help links, asking questions, or tagging projects and goals with that topic. Topic names cannot be edited at this stage.

What's the difference between the topic homepage and the topic feed in Atlas?

When you follow a topic in Atlas, you’ll see a feed for that topic in the left-hand sidebar in your Atlas Home. This feed will show the latest updates from projects and goals that have been tagged with that topic. Think of the topic feed as a way to quickly filter your All updates feed.

A topic’s homepage, accessible from the topics directory, aggregates all projects and goals and their updates, help and knowledge, and people. To view a topic’s homepage, just click a tag anywhere in Atlas or find the topic via the topics directory.

Topic feed	Topic homepage

---

Thanks Atlas community for your continued support of Atlas. We look forward to you trying out this new set of features for curating work and hearing your feedback. 

[Shana Blackstone]

I have a suggestion for the topics page. Could you include the "About this topic" information on the main Topics page?

To make it easier for everyone to see what each topic is being used for I am filling in the "About this topic" section. But that means every user must click on a topic to see this info. 

Business Case: to prevent users from creating too many topics and to understand why a topic exists, it would be great to have a page where they can easily scan topic names and see a description of each. Even if the space for the descriptions was limited and you had to hover over the field to see the full description, that would still be better than clicking each topic individually. 

Perhaps you could let users choose to display the "About this topic" as you do with Columns on the Projects page.