Behind the scenes: boards, email and Drive

Publishing is only part of running a studio. The rest is planning, answering mail and passing files around, and those jobs now happen in the Studio Desk too.

Boards

Staff keep internal projects on kanban boards: columns of cards that move along as work gets done. A new board starts with To do, In progress, Review and Done, and the columns can be renamed, added or reordered.

A card can hold who is working on it, a due date, a priority, labels, a checklist, a description and comments. Cards move by dragging with a mouse, a finger or the keyboard, or by picking a column inside the card. All the staff who work on the site's content see the same boards, and each person's open cards wait for them on their dashboard. Nothing on a board is ever published.

The studio mailbox

Mail sent to team@, contact@ and press@ arrives in one shared mailbox, and every staff member can read and answer it from the Desk. A reply goes out from the address the message was sent to. Each send and each move is recorded with the name of the person who made it, since everyone answers as the studio.

Pictures from the web stay hidden in a message until someone presses Show pictures, because loading them would tell the sender the message was opened. Attachments always download to the computer.

Drive

The Desk can also connect to the studio's shared Google Drive folder. Once it is connected, staff browse it, upload several files at once, make folders and download what they need, with Google Docs, Sheets and Slides exported to Word, Excel, PowerPoint or PDF. The connection reaches only that one folder, and the rest of the account stays out of view.

None of this shows on the public site. It is where the work behind our projects gets planned and passed around.