The company I work at (~100 people, 100% remote) is about 10 months in to incorporating Coda into our tool stack. Thus far, we have adopted it for planning, OKR tracking, several rituals (retrospectives, postmortems, etc), and project management.
While many love the functionality that Coda brings, a lot of people have trouble navigating the company space as a whole. That is to say, they have a hard time understanding how different docs relate to one another, or how to get from one to another. I think this stems from most folks being used to a wiki/nested structure (in particular, in Confluence), rather than a hub structure (like Coda).
So my question to you all is, have you encountered this problem when trying to adopt Coda at your company? If so, how did you address it? Would you have any suggestions for me and the company I am at?
I had the same problem in my company but I work in a small company (>50) with an industrial purpose so it’s not usual at all for them (for example, no one is remote) so it’s more “normal” in my case. I have only 2 doc makers so I added every doc a person should use to their internet shortcuts so they don’t see the Coda workspace that can be quite confusing for newbies AND non-english speakers. It will absolutely not work in your case because I think you have many docs.
Part of my job is managing internal communications so i’m wondering, in your case, what is the business of your company ? How many or what percentage of doc makers ? How many docs ? Do you use the folders ?
Create a master doc with an overview of all the other docs, with links to those docs.
You can structure that document in any way you want
a page per linked document, so that you have your hierarchical structure in your pages.
a searchable table with links to the various docs as well as a description of the docs.
You could take this to a higher level - if certain docs are only accessible by certain people, you can add a column with staff names, and then use that to filter using user() so that they will only see their docs.
Using columns on a page to organise the links to the docs
Hi Aurelie, thanks for sharing. We are in the energy technology business. In our company of ~90 people, we have 3 doc makers who create and manage the central ~10 docs that everybody uses on a regular basis. We do use the folders, but have found that there is some left to be desired there in that there is only one level of organization available to them.
What we ended up doing is creating a single “Coda Directory” document that has every Coda doc in the org synced to a table, and has metadata tagged to each (such as owner, purpose, views, and created). This way, folks can navigate our company’s coda doc landscape easily and with filters, and we can prompt doc owners to add metadata to enable the entire process.
Hi Piet, we took your suggestion and went with #1! We are happy with how it turned out. Now, with a doc (and table within) serving as a directory of every doc in the organization, we can tag docs with metadata and owners to create a fully navigate-able landscape, and prompt owners to keep their docs up to date. I hope this works for others too! Thanks for the suggestion.
i also use a ‘king’ doc which contains nothing but links to the other docs that users need.
each link has a description text to explain it.
the links are grouped by role, so users can see whats available for their role.
it has one other major benefit;
when we make changes to a production doc, we do so by copying to the another version.
we have the version number in the doc name.
so, when a new version is ready to ‘go live’, we just change the link in the king doc.
that way we ensure that all users are using the correct version.
but the older versions are available if we should need to ‘roll-back’.
