A workspace is where you collaborate with your teammates in Mural. It’s where rooms and their murals are housed. Think of it as your virtual office building. This article covers a handful of tips and tricks to keep your workspace organized and easy to navigate.
Note: For more information on Mural’s workspace architecture, check out the article on how mural accounts are organized. |
Contents
Plan a workspace architecture strategy
It’s important to plan ahead and design a Mural workspace architecture strategy with intention. It can be tempting to dive in and get started and figure out the organization later. But, the sooner you put together a strategy for organizing your workspace, the better it’ll be for your team. Hey, you can even facilitate a Mural brainstorming session with your team and work together to come up with a strategy.
Here are some questions to ask yourself when mapping out your workspace strategy:
(Enterprise only) What’s the purpose of your workspace(s)? If you’re part of an Enterprise plan, that plan allows multiple workspaces. But, many companies only need a single workspace. If you decide to have more than one workspace, ensure that each additional workspace has a distinct purpose.
How will you use rooms? Will you have a room for each different project, for each team, or perhaps each team member?
How will you use folders? Maybe you’ll use folders to organize projects by date, or whether a task is open or closed. Obviously, find what works best for you and your team. (Note: Folders aren’t available on the Free plan.)
What naming conventions will you use when titling your content? Naming conventions help keep your content organized and easier to find.
Will you implement version control for your content? Or, will you keep each mural as a living, ever-changing file?
When will you archive unused content? Are there instances when you’ll delete content?
Have fewer workspaces (Enterprise only)
If you’re part of an Enterprise plan, that plan allows multiple workspaces. But, many companies only need a single workspace. There are many benefits to having fewer workspaces:
Lower administrative effort - There’s less administrative configuration to manage, and it’ll be easier to have consistent controls across workspaces.
Better user experience - More consistent and understandable workspace-level configuration means easier access by company members, higher satisfaction, and increased productivity.
Improved collaboration - Workspace members can more easily find rooms and murals, since there are less workspaces to sort through. Further, it’s easier to share a mural or room with another member without having to consider if they belong to that workspace.
We recommend designing a Mural workspace architecture strategy with intention. Each additional workspace should have a distinct purpose.
Note: The Mural success team will work with Enterprise customers to lay this strategy out. If you have further questions, reach out to your success representative. |
Create different rooms for different projects
One of your best tools for tidying a workspace is the room feature. Rooms are an efficient way of organizing murals for different projects. Each room can contain several folders and murals.
Note: Folders aren’t available on the Free plan. |
Check out our Rooms in Mural article for more information about rooms.
Rooms are either open, private, or confidential:
Open rooms are for everyone in your workspace.
Private rooms can only be seen by those invited in.
Confidential rooms offer an added level of security and are only available on our Enterprise plans.
Think of your team’s workflow. Do you have agile processes? If so, you could make a room called Agile Processes. Do you have monthly reflection meetings? Make a room with a title that matches. Or, if you have multiple smaller teams, perhaps each team can have its own room.
Here’s an example of how that room organization may look:
Brainstorm about the structure of your team and team meetings, and adjust your room names accordingly. Also, if using a private or confidential room, make sure to add everyone to the room as members. This way, they have access to all the secure content that lives in that room.
You can also favorite a room to keep your personal Mural dashboard organized so you can easily access your favorite (“starred”) content.
To view your starred rooms, click Rooms in the left sidebar to open the Rooms page. You’ll find your favorite rooms under the Starred rooms section.
Use folders
Folders offer even more granular organization than rooms. Folders are available to all paid plans and can live in your workspace, in a room, or even within another folder. You can organize your folders in the way that best works for you. An example use case is if your team has a daily standup, then you could add the daily standup murals to a folder for each week of the month.
An important note to keep in mind is that folders are presented in your dashboard alphabetically (A-Z). So, when titling your folders, keep that order in mind. We cover this more in the next section on Naming conventions for rooms and folders.
To learn more about folders, check out our article use folders to tidy up your murals in a room.
Create naming conventions
It’s important that room names, folder names, and titles of murals are consistent and clear. Something to keep in mind is how Mural organizes content in a dashboard. Rooms and folders, for example, are presented alphabetically (A-Z).
Note: One exception is the Recently opened rooms section, which lists the rooms based on how recently they were accessed. The most-recently-accessed rooms are at the top of the list. |
Naming conventions for rooms and folders
While the A-Z organization may seem like a simple detail, let’s look at this in practice. Let’s say you have folders for each month of the year and you call them exactly that: January, February, March, and April. The folders won’t list in chronological order by month. Rather, they’ll maintain the alphabetical organization and show up in the following order: April, February, January, March.
It’s an easy fix. By thinking and planning ahead, you could create a naming convention such us YYYY_MM (for example), which would show up in the correct order:
Another example could be to use T_ to denote a team and P_ for a project. Obviously, naming conventions are about as unique as what you like to eat for breakfast. Find what works for you and your team, communicate it with the team, and stick to it.
Naming conventions for murals
We recommend naming murals with the title of the activity or project so that it’s clear from the thumbnail view: What is this mural about? Check out the following screenshot for examples of clear titles versus an unclear title:
The first two examples make it pretty clear what type of content is inside of the mural. The third mural, however, has a generic title that isn’t at all helpful.
Here are some ways you can create high-quality, clear titles for your murals:
Include the date when a mural was created, or the date of the meeting that corresponded with facilitation of that mural.
Include the mural version if you're planning to produce multiple versions of it.
Make sure the title answers the question: What is this mural about? Go for clarity rather than cuteness here. Save the playfulness for the content on your mural’s canvas!
Note: Put the date or version at the beginning of the title so it's visible from the thumbnail view on the dashboard. If the title of a mural is too long, the last bit of it gets cut off from the thumbnail view. |
Archive unused murals
Archiving murals gives you a way to store content without permanently deleting it. Archived murals are stored separately and will not show in the dashboard until you change the room filter.
Here’s an article on viewing archived murals and unarchiving murals.
Best practices for organizing a workspace
To recap, here are some pro tips on keeping your workspace organized and easy to use for your entire team.
Plan ahead and design a Mural workspace architecture strategy with intention. (Hey, you could even map out this strategy in your own mural!) Each workspace should have a clear purpose and focus, to prevent work and team members from getting too scattered.
Use Mural’s rooms and folders features to further organize your workspace.
When you create a private or confidential room for your team or for a project, make sure to add everyone to the room as members. This way, they have access to all the content that lives in that room.
Add your top-used rooms to your favorites so you can easily find the content you need from the Rooms page on your personal Mural dashboard.
Get creative with the best naming conventions for your team. The naming conventions should be clear, easy to remember, and should play nicely with the A-Z organization of how content is presented on the Mural dashboard.
Duplicating murals is the best way to keep track of version control of murals.
Make sure to create clear and valuable titles to your murals.