New tools for a more organized workspace

What’s new

Today, we’re introducing new tools to help you organize your Hex workspace.

It’s a law of physics that entropy increases in closed systems — unless energy is put into a system, order turns into chaos.

The same goes for any collaborative software tool: even the tidiest workspaces, with the clearest internal guides on how to keep things tidy, become messy over time.

And while that chaos might be irritating for those that love organization, it also has a real cost for those trying to consume information: Which is the right project to use? Why should I visit this collection if it isn’t regularly updated? How can I find valuable artifacts amongst dozens of abandoned untitled projects?

We can’t change the laws of physics — there needs to be a bit of energy to avoid chaos. But we can provide tools to make the task of keeping things organized much easier and more enjoyable.

Keep your Hex workspace tidy

Filter and sort the projects in your workspace

Previously, projects could be filtered by status, category, and title – we’ve moved these to a new home, giving space for some new filters: creator, owner, and sharing settings. We’ve also added new ways to sort your projects: created date and last-edited date joined some of our existing sorts.

Organize projects in bulk

Admins, Managers, and Editors can select projects and organize them en masse, instead of updating them individually. Change a project’s status, apply categories, or move a bunch of old, unfinished projects to the trash.

A few ways to organize your workspace

Spring clean… in June

To have an organized workspace, we must first let go of the projects that no longer spark joy 🧘‍♀️.

These new features make it easier than ever to find project that may be contributing to clutter. Filter to ‘Untitled project,’ or sort by projects that haven’t been viewed in a long time and move them to the archive or trash.

We also made it possible for non-Admins to pitch in: Editors can bulk select projects, and are prompted to update their selection to only the projects they have permission to update.

With a few clicks, you’ll have a clean workspace ready to be organized. 🧼 ✨

Endorse popular projects

We recently introduced Endorsed Statuses: a way for Admins and Managers to distinguish projects that are trusted, canonical work from those that are in-progress.

A great place to start is by checking if your highly-used projects deserve this special treatment. Sort the Projects page by the number of app views and apply an endorsed status to signal their value to the rest of your team.

Group your projects into collections

If your team isn’t yet using collections, it’s now easier than ever to start. Find projects with key words in their title, or projects created by a subject matter expert, and group them together in a relevant collection.

Require reviews on source-of-truth projects

If you’re already using a collection to group together critical, source-of-truth projects, you now ensure they all require a review. Hop into a collection that houses your Board Meeting reports, for example, and select projects to enforce required reviews.

Update a project’s owner when teams change

Teams change over time. The person who created a project might no longer be the best person to ask for help on it, or might no longer be available. We recently introduced the concept of a project owner, which can be transferred as your team evolves.

Filter to projects created by a user, and transfer the ownership of the projects to the new subject matter expert.

Make it easy to find what you’re looking for

A little bit of organization goes a long way. By spending an afternoon reorganizing your Hex workspace, your team members will be able to find what they’re looking for more quickly, differentiate between what’s trusted and what’s in progress, and discover related projects in a collection.

These new features are also built on a solid foundation that we can expand upon — if there’s functionality you’d like to see here, let us know.