Topics (curated by tagging objects), are a simple, powerful way to get more value from Atlas, especially as you scale. In this article, we'll cover:

Topics are collections of projects, goals, people, teams, help, and knowledge based on tags. The purpose of Topics is to aggregate a group of objects and represent something more meaningful to a reader. In Atlas' case, we’ve seen common use cases of tagging be programs, departments, products, areas of expertise, etc.

Just like projects, goals, and teams, you can also follow topics in Atlas. Click on a topic in the right sidebar of a project or goal and you'll be taken to your Home where you'll be given the option to follow the topic.

When you follow a topic you will:

From both the projects and goals directories, you'll be able to filter results based on topics. You can combine filters with AND/OR statements like, Tag is marketing or engineering. Embed results in Jira or Confluence Cloud or export to CSV.

Great for program/initiative/team reporting, when you paste a link to a topic from Atlas and select Display embed, you get a live view list of all current and upcoming projects tagged with that topic. Expanding a project will show its latest update.

In the bottom right corner of a project's or a goal's page in Atlas, you'll see a section called Tags where you create and add new tags, add existing ones, or view tags that have already been added to represent a topic.

From the navigation menu, you'll see Topics.

From here you can:

As you ramp up your use of Atlas across teams to align on and communicate the status of projects and goals, we recommend adopting some tagging standards. This will help keep your projects and goals categorized and aid the creation of roll-up reports that can be embedded in Jira or Confluence Cloud, or exported to CSV.

Using tags to curate topics is incredibly flexible, so it's really up to you how you use them. Below are a few examples of how we use topics at Atlassian, which will hopefully inspire your own tagging system.

Tag a project to reflect the department within which it is being run. Examples include:

Similar to department above but one click down. For example:

Use this to indicate which phase or stage a unit of work is in based on whatever framework your company or teams use. For example:

Since projects in Atlas can be used to communicate the context and progress against units of work of all shapes and sizes, tag work to reflect the size of a "project" in Atlas. For example:

💡 Running larger programs or initiatives? Here's a guide on modelling them in Atlas