Choosing A Project

There are several moments in Sapience where you have to say which project something belongs to. You save a useful answer out of a chat. You start a new task from the New menu. You put an agent to work on a schedule and tell it which project to work in.

Those moments used to feel like three different products. Each one asked the same question in its own way, and each one handed you the projects in a different order — none of which put the projects you actually work in anywhere near the top.

They are now one thing. Wherever you pick a project, you get the same list, in the same order: the projects you have starred come first, each with a gold star beside it, and then everything else, most recently updated at the top. So the project you want is where you expect it to be, whichever corner of Sapience you happen to be standing in.

Two rules, applied in order.

1. Starred projects come first. If you have starred a project as a favourite, it sits at the top of the list with a gold star next to it. The star is there on purpose — so you can see why a project is sitting where it is, rather than wondering.

2. Then, most recently updated first. Everything you haven't starred follows, with whatever you touched most recently at the top. In practice that means the work you have in front of you right now floats up on its own, without you having to organise anything.

Star a project and it moves to the top straight away — you don't have to close the dialog and reopen it, and you don't have to reload the page. If you find yourself scrolling to the same project every day, star it. That is the whole point of the first rule.

Every one of these lists has a search box at the top. Start typing part of a project's name and the list narrows as you type. This is the fastest route when you have a lot of projects — quicker than scrolling, and it works identically in every place you pick a project. Clear the box and the full list comes back, in the usual order.

When you start a task from the New menu, Sapience now only offers projects that are actually running. Three kinds of project no longer appear as somewhere a task could go: archived projects, which you have deliberately put away; completed projects, where the work is finished; and templates, which are a starting point for new projects rather than a place work lives.

Previously all three were offered, which made it easy to file a task somewhere it would never be seen again.

This applies to choosing a destination for a task. It doesn't hide anything from you elsewhere — your archived projects are still in your projects list, and your templates are still there to start new projects from.

One deliberate exception: Scheduled Jobs shows you every project, archived ones included. If you set up a job months ago against a project you have since archived, that job still needs to be editable, so the project is still listed there.

Some projects reach you through a share that lets you read but not change things. You can open one of those, but you cannot add a task to it — there is nowhere for your task to be saved. If you pick one when starting a task, Sapience tells you so and leaves the picker open, so you can simply choose a different project and carry on. You don't lose what you were doing.

Picking a project is now the same experience everywhere in Sapience: one list, one order — starred projects first, then most recently updated — with a search box for when you want to jump straight to one. Starting a task offers only projects that are actually running, so work doesn't get filed into something archived or into a template by accident.