You can now organize your staff and Kanban boards into teams in TopLeft. This makes it easy for staff to know which boards are relevant to them, and makes access control and configuration much more flexible.

This will be released to customers over the next week. If you'd like to try it right away, email help@topleft.team.

We are also introducing a metrics dashboard, closely integrated with the teams function. Watch this space for that announcement very soon!

Teams are used in a variety of places in TopLeft, offering an improved experience for everyone. Here's how teams can help:

Improved Navigation

In the main menu, boards are listed by their teams, and each user's assigned team(s) are listed first. The boards relevent to each user are listed at the top.

The dashboard we're introducing is organized by team, too.

Improved Board Setup and Dispatching

Using teams makes it easier to configure and use the Kanban boards, in two ways:

• A board can be filtered to only show work assigned to people in the board's team. This means when people join or leave a team, it's no longer necessary to change the filters on all the team's boards- just change the team membership in one place, and the boards are updated automatically.
• When assigning members to a ticket, the members available to assign are limited to the board's team members. The dispatcher doesn't need to choose from the whole list of TopLeft users.

Access Control

Teams can be used to restrict access to boards in two ways.

1. Individual boards can be restricted so they are only available to members of the board's team.
2. A new app-wide setting can restrict all boards to members of each board's team. This changes TopLeft from a default-available access mode to a default-restricted mode.

Learn more in the knowledgebase.

This access control method will replace the "security groups" method in TopLeft. The old method is still supported but will be phased out soon.

Flexible Management of Boards

Users no longer need to be a full administrator to create or update boards. A manager of a team can create, edit, and delete boards for the team, withouth being an administrator.

How to Use Teams

There are two steps to use teams in TopLeft.

1. Create a team and specify managers and members.
   As an administrator, on the settings page click Teams.
   
   
   In the Create a Team form, enter the team name, then click Create. Then you can choose the manager(s) and member(s) of the team. Managers will be able to create and update boards for the team.
   
   An individual can be a manager or member of many teams.
2. Assign one or more boards to the team. On the edit page for a board, go to the Teams tab and choose the team the board belongs to.
   
   

Learn more about managing teams in the knowledgebase.

Recommended Actions

In addition to following the above steps to organize your members and boards, we have a few recommended actions:

1. If you have Kanban boards that use filters for assigned members that are part of a team, change the boards from specifying specific members to using the "filter to team" option. This will allow you to change the filters for many boards at once by changing the team membership.
2. If some users have been given administrative permissions so they are able to manage boards, but they don't need to manage site-wide settings, remove their administrative permissions and instead make them a manager of one or more teams.
3. If you use the security groups function to limit access to boards, migrate to the new teams-based restrictions instead.

We hope this function is helpful. If you have questions, email help@topleft.team.