Knowledge base

The knowledge base is the written half of your work. Process notes, briefs, meeting notes, the recipe for the thing you always forget how to do. Pages sit inside spaces, nest under each other as deep as you need, and each one tells you plainly who can see it.

Go to Work then Knowledge Base. The tree is on the left, the page you are reading is on the right.

Spaces

A space is the top level: a folder for one subject, one team or one part of the business. Pages live inside it.

To create one, click the plus beside Spaces at the top of the tree.

1. Give it a Name.
2. Choose a Visibility:
   • Public, all team members means everyone on your team can open it.
   • Private, invited members only means only the people you add can.
3. Click Create.

Hover a space row and a menu appears with Rename, which also lets you change its visibility or archive it, and Share, which is covered below. A globe icon on the row means the space is open to the team; a padlock means it is private.

Pages

Click the plus on a space row to add a page at its top level. Click the plus that appears when you hover a page row to add a page inside that one. That is how the tree gets its shape.

A page opens in the pane on the right:

• The breadcrumb across the top shows the space and the pages above this one, and every part of it is clickable. On a deep page the middle of the trail collapses behind a "…" that still navigates, so the title never gets pushed off the screen.
• The big text field under it is the page title. Type in it and it saves when you click away.
• Everything below is the page body. It saves on its own as you write, and a small marker beside the actions says Unsaved, Saving or Saved so you always know where you stand.
• A switch marks the page Published rather than a Draft. A published page carries a Live badge in the tree, which is how everyone else knows it is finished rather than half-written.

Moving a page

Two ways, depending on how far it is going.

Drag it. Pick up a page row and drop it on another page to nest it there, or on the space row to bring it back to the top level.

Use the dialog. Open the page, click the actions menu in the top right, and choose Move. Search for the new parent page or pick Top level. Everything nested under the page moves with it.

Deleting a page

The actions menu also holds Delete page. The confirmation says what is about to happen, including how many sub-pages the page has. Sub-pages are not deleted with it: they move up to sit alongside where their parent was.

There is no undo, so read the confirmation.

Searching

Two routes to the same search:

• The search box in the dashboard header while you are on the Knowledge Base.
• The keyboard shortcut, Cmd-K on a Mac or Ctrl-K elsewhere.

Either opens a search box in the middle of the screen. It searches page titles and contents, so a page you cannot remember the name of is still findable by a phrase inside it. Start typing and results appear after a couple of characters. Picking one opens it and expands the tree around it, so you land in place rather than adrift.

Search only ever returns pages you are allowed to open.

Who can see a page

This is the part worth reading twice, because a permission model you have to guess at is one you will get wrong.

Inheritance

A page normally inherits its access from whatever is above it: its parent page, or failing that its space. Nothing is written against the page itself, and everyone who can read the parent can read it.

A page can also own its access. Then it keeps only the permissions written against it directly, and a permission on its parent or its space no longer reaches in. That is what makes a restricted page genuinely restricted.

In the tree, a page that owns its access carries a small padlock, so you can tell at a glance which pages break the pattern.

Changing the rule

Open the page, click the actions menu and look under Who can see this page. Three options, with a tick against the one in force:

• Same as its parent or space, which is inheritance.
• Public, all team members.
• Private, invited members only.

Beside the actions menu, a private page shows a padlock and the word Private as standing furniture. That one is not hidden behind a menu on purpose: it is for the person about to paste something sensitive, who is not going to open a menu first.

Sharing with specific people

Choose Share from the actions menu, or from a space's menu, and you get the full picture in one dialog.

To add someone:

1. Pick a team member.
2. Pick what they can do: view, comment, edit or manage.
3. Click Add.

The list below is split in two, and the split is the important bit:

• Also has access are people who can already reach this page through its parent or its space. Each one names where that permission came from. There is no remove button on these, because removing it here would do nothing. You have to go to where it was given.
• Added here are the permissions written against this page. These can be removed.

Someone can legitimately appear in both lists. That is exactly the case where taking away the direct permission would not actually cut them off, which is why you can see it before you try.

Owners and admins of your account always have access, and the dialog says so at the bottom.

Shared with me

Under your own spaces, a Shared with me section collects pages someone has given you access to individually. If you can see a page but not the page it sits under, it appears with a Shared badge rather than being buried where you would never find it.

Project files

Every project in Work has a Files tab, and it is this same tree and this same editor. A page is the unit there too: you create a page, title it, write what the document means, and attach the file it belongs to.

Three things are different, and each of them is on purpose:

A project's files are not listed here. They do not appear alongside your other spaces in the Knowledge Base, and there is no route from here into them. You reach them through the project.

Access follows the project, not the page. There is no per-page share control on a project file, because the project has already answered that question. Instead, each page shows a Who can see this line naming the people who can actually open it.

Nothing in them is public. Files you embed in a project page are stored privately and opened through a short-lived link created at the moment you click, never a fixed web address. There is nothing to forward, cache or guess.

Adding files to a project

On the project's Files tab:

• New page creates a page to write in.
• The drop area at the bottom of the tree takes files. Each one becomes its own page in the tree, and its text is pulled out afterwards, including from scans and recordings, so it can be searched and quoted with a reference back to the exact page or timestamp.
• A summary above the tree tells you how many documents are still being read, how many could not be read, and how many are a file type that cannot be read at all.

A file page shows the file and an Open button rather than a preview, and you can still write notes underneath it. That reading step is what lets you ask questions of the project on its overview tab, so a file that failed to read is one the answers cannot quote.

The search box at the top of the Files tab narrows the tree to matching page names.

Files that arrive by email

The Intake address button on the Files tab generates a single-use email address for that project. Anything sent to it, message and attachments, is filed into the project's files, and then the address stops working. Send to it a second time and it bounces back to the sender.

Copy the address when it is shown to you, because it is only shown once. Unused, it closes on its own after a while, and you can close it early with Close now.