Advice for Large Companies

How hundreds, or thousands, can communicate better

A large-scale team has particular needs and challenges because your work, functions, and interactions can be very complex. Here are some options that have worked for existing clients, while maintaining as flat a structure as possible (important for discoverability).

Option 1: Unlimited Channels [Our Recommendation]

A lot of people's default reaction to this option would be to think that too many channels can become mess. From our research, there isn't such a thing as too many channels, as long as they are organised effectively.

  1. Keep the one Organization for all company teams, maintaining a very flat structure.

  2. No limit on number of channels, but segment by channel type - team, event, project, etc..

  3. Follow a strict naming convention (see below)

  4. Tags are used for “topics” rather than areas, teams or projects

Channel breakdown example

  • One main channel for each team/department

  • For research that can be shared with everyone, having the one “main” channel can work towards “department branding”

    • #dept-data-science [public]

    • #dept-sales [public]

    • #dept-engineering [public]

  • Have a channel for onboarding reports. If a user is unsure where to publish their first report, they can do so here, and the channel admin can move it accordingly.

    • “#welcome” [public]

  • Have channels specifically for events

    • “#event-hackathon-2023” [public]

  • And project-specific channels for sub-sets of users, for private & task-related research.

    • “#project-external-collaboration” [private]

    • “#project-sales-projectName” [private]

Non-permanent channels should be archived when not in use/project is finished. Kyso will maintain everything from those channels, and users will still be able to search for them.

Any project-specific channels for private work and/or specific sub-segments of users need to be made private. In this way, users will only see a list of public channels and the private channels to which they have access. So no one user should see 00s of channels.

Option 2: More “Public” Organisations

Another option could be to add more entities to the top layer of Kyso's hierarchy. Maybe better for categorisation, but does add more clicks to a user's browsing experience!

  1. Each (big) team or department has their own organization on Kyso.

    1. E.g. Acme, R&D

  2. Organisations would be public by default.

  3. Channels represent topics

    1. E.g. #genomeA

  4. Tags are used for further categorisation within channels/teams

    1. E.g. #test1

Note that currently users who are NOT explicit members of an organisation will be able to find an organisation’s content only when using the global search function. This is because you (currently) only see organisations on the homepage of which you are already a member.

If you want to go with Option 2, we can customise your deployment and list all Organisations on the homepage by default. Users could click into any Organisation, which are all Public by default How this would work: Explicit members of the organisation see all channels - public and protected. Some members will also see private channels that they have access to. Non-members will only see public channels.

Switching between options

If, at any time, you decide that you'd like to switch how you segment users and content, but already have 00s, if not 000s of reports and users, don't worry. We will work closely with you to make the transition as smooth as possible :)

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