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Your first project

In this tutorial you create a project from a template, add a few work items and open the board.

Find your way around

Section titled “Find your way around”
  • Side menu. Moves between the areas of Orbit. Saved boards have a directory of their own.
  • Command palette. Press Ctrl+K (or /) to search and jump to recent items, projects, boards and filters. See Keyboard shortcuts.
  • For you. Your home shows work assigned to you, work where you were mentioned, work you watch and recent items. Counts respect work item visibility.
  • Create dialog. The create dialog uses type-ahead fields: pick a person, a label or a version by typing, and create a value in place when it does not exist yet.

Create the project

Section titled “Create the project”

  1. On first use, onboarding asks what kind of team you are: software, business, service or discovery (or “not sure”). Based on your answer it recommends up to five project templates from the catalog. You can skip onboarding and dismiss it.

  2. Choose a template. The built-in templates are:

    Template Family
    Software Scrum software
    Business task tracking business
    Service internal requests service
    Discovery idea triage discovery
    Business process approval business

    A template sets up the workflow, work types and project features that fit the team type. The service and discovery templates configure ordinary Orbit work: they do not add a customer portal, SLAs, or idea scoring.

  3. Give the project a name and a key. A key has 2 to 10 uppercase letters or digits, begins with a letter and must be unique in the site. You become the project lead.

  4. Choose how the project is managed. This is chosen once and cannot be changed afterwards:

    • Team-managed: project administrators change workflows, statuses, work types, screens and custom fields themselves.
    • Company-managed: only site administrators change that configuration, so it is shared and consistent across projects.

    Only site administrators can create company-managed projects. Everyone else creates team-managed projects.

  5. Review the summary. Orbit checks the project with the real validators before creating anything and lists warnings and blockers. Then create it. The project, your membership and its configuration are created in one step.

Optional details such as a description, a colour, an icon, a category and a default assignee can be set at creation or later in the project’s details. Viewers cannot create projects.

Add the first work items

Section titled “Add the first work items”

  1. Press C or use the create button. The dialog follows the project’s create screen, so it shows the fields your administrators chose.

  2. Choose a type (epic, story, task, bug or sub-task), write a summary and save. Use the option to create another straight after saving when you are adding several.

  3. Click a work item key to open it in the side panel. Ctrl or Cmd plus click, or middle click, opens it on its own page in a new tab.

Details for working with items are in Work items.

Open the board

Section titled “Open the board”

Open the project and go to its board. A Scrum template gives you a board with a backlog and sprints, and a Kanban project gives a continuous board. Columns map to statuses, and moving a card runs the workflow transition. Read Boards, backlog and sprints next.

Next steps

Section titled “Next steps”