Spaces, Breakouts and keeping things tidy

Your first Channel is a joy. Your fifth is fine. Somewhere around your twentieth, the sidebar starts to look like the drawer in the kitchen where the batteries, the takeaway menus and a single mystery key all live together. Nothing is lost, exactly. You cannot find any of it.

This chapter is about putting up shelves.

Spaces are the shelves#

A Space is a group of Channels that belong together: a client, a team, a product launch, the office move. Every Channel sits in at least one Space, and when you click a Space's pill at the top of the sidebar, you see only its Channels. The rest of the Organization's work is still there, on other shelves, out of your way.

Spaces also do a second job, and it matters more than the first: a Space decides who can see what is on it. Some Spaces are open to everyone in the Organization. Others are open only to the people listed as its participants. Put a Channel on a private shelf and the rest of the Organization does not see it in their sidebar, cannot open it and cannot find it in search. Once that clicks, most of this chapter is common sense: where you file a Channel is also a decision about who reads it.

If you used Rally in its early days, you knew Spaces as Projects. They were renamed when they grew from a simple folder into the thing that also controls access.

Breakouts are the margins#

Conversations wander. Halfway through planning a launch, someone wonders whether the pricing page needs rewriting, and suddenly the Channel is about the pricing page. A Breakout is where that tangent goes instead. It is a side conversation inside a Channel, private to you when it starts, with Rally already briefed on everything said so far. Draft something rough, or bring in one colleague to argue it through. The main conversation carries on undisturbed. You have written in the margin instead of tearing a page out of the notebook.

Breakouts used to be called Substreams, a name that sounded like plumbing and has been retired with full honours.

And then finding things again#

The chapter ends with search, which looks through every message, link, artifact and file you are allowed to read, and with links that drop a teammate into exactly the right Channel or Breakout.

If you read only one page of this chapter carefully, make it Who can see what. The rest is about tidiness. That one is about privacy.