Canvases

In the last chapter you made your first Canvas and asked Rally for something. This chapter is about what happens after that, which is most of the time you will spend in Rally.

A conversation with a thing beside it#

A Canvas is one piece of work. Not a department, and not a place where announcements go to be ignored. "The March offsite plan" is a good Canvas. "Marketing" is a filing cabinet.

Every Canvas has two parts. On the left is a conversation, where you, the people you invite and Rally talk about the work. On the right is the work itself: whatever Rally made, whether that is a document, a spreadsheet, an image, a PDF or a small website. You ask in the conversation, Rally publishes a new version on the right, and you look at it and ask for the next one.

Most chat apps treat their bot like the office printer: you walk over to it, you collect what it made, you carry it back to your desk. In a Canvas the agent sits at the table with everyone else and hands the thing round. It reads the whole conversation, answers the parts meant for it, and leaves the rest of the chat to the humans.

That has a pleasant side effect. Everything about the piece of work collects in one place. The questions, the decisions, the files you dropped in, every version Rally made and the comments people left on it are all in the same scroll, in the order they happened. When someone new joins next week, you share the Canvas with them and they can read the whole story instead of asking you to catch them up.

Yours until you share it#

A new Canvas is private to whoever made it. You decide when to bring other people in: a few named teammates, a guest from outside your Organization, or everyone in the Organization at once. People who have the Canvas open show up at the top of the window and in the sidebar, so you can tell when somebody is looking at the draft you just asked Rally to rewrite.

What this chapter covers#

The chapter opens with what a Canvas is and how the list of Canvases works. Then come the parts of the conversation, starting at the bottom of the window with the message box, then attachments, then the page people ask about most: what is going on while Rally works, how to steer it, and what to do when a run fails. Then reading Rally's answers, and leaving comments on what Rally made.

The second half is about people: who is in a Canvas, who can see it, sharing it with guests from outside your Organization, the dots and badges that tell you where you are needed, and finding things again with search and links.