Creating SharedStatus Labels for a Project

Labels are a powerful way to organize your SharedStatus projects. The key advantage over having a single “category” is that you can apply as many labels as you like to any message, task or file in a project. Very often things aren’t easily classified with a single attribute; labels let you think about your project assets in a different way.

A label can represent a variety of different attributes. To update yours just go to the Settings areas of any of your projects. Below are a few examples we at SharedStatus use to help manage our internal projects:

Critical: We apply the critical label to any task (or message) that requires immediate attention. At any point in time we can see what’s critical on a project by limiting our view to items that have the critical label applied.

Need Feedback: This is actually a transitory label. With the large quantity of messages and tasks that we place in our more active projects, sometimes we want a way to call out things that we want feedback on from other team members. Once the creator of the task or message has received enough feedback they remove that label.

Reference: There are many times when we need a place to record important instructions for something. It may be as simple as a process for uploading files to a specific web server or details on how to renew some certificate. By applying the reference label we call out to any project members that this is something that they may not need to read right away but could serve as reference material in the future.

Competition: As we discover new competitors in our space we create a message in one of our core projects that includes a link to their web site and any information that may be useful in the future.

Bug: If we find a bug in our product, we create a task to fix it and apply the bug label. If the bug is critical, then the Critical label above is also applied.

Feature: Similar to a bug, the Feature label is used to identify an area of the product that could be improved or added. As we have brainstorming meetings to identify new features we record them and apply the Feature label; sometimes the feature is used to address a bug so both Bug and Feature get applied.

Future: This label is often used for features that are considered “long term”. Basically the Future label is applied to items that have not been clearly defined or scheduled (most often something that has a Future label as well).

RC (for Release Candidate): As we cycle through our development efforts, we apply the RC label to tasks that are being actively coded up for the next release. This makes it very easy to see what should make it into the next major cycle.

Hosting: As a SaaS (Software as a Service) provider we have a lot of information that is specific to our hosting environment. This label helps us quickly see hosting related issues. If we are engaged in a conversation with one of our hosting providers a quick click of this label tells us of any other outstanding issues we may need to tell them about.

These are just some of the labels we use in several of our projects. Right now labels are a powerful way to organize your SharedStatus information and we have a range of features identified—and appropriately labeled with feature in one of our projects—to bring you soon!