Channels, views, and categories

Almost every messy Ravenna workspace has the same cause: someone made a channel when they needed a view. Channels multiply, routing gets ambiguous, and nobody knows where to send a request. The reference docs describe what each of these does. This page makes the call.

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The one-line version

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Channels are intake surfaces, so keep them few

A channel answers two questions: where does this request arrive, and which team owns it. That is the whole job. Most workspaces should start with one general channel plus a triage channel, then add more as real patterns emerge from real volume. If you cannot name the distinct process a proposed channel exists to serve, you want a view.

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Views are how work streams get sliced

Views are the answer to nearly every “can we see just the…” question. They are cheap, private or shared, and reversible. Five views cover most teams: Two mechanics that shape how you design them:

• Filters are AND only. There is no OR inside one view. To see A or B, build two views.
• Shared views are for team workflows, private views are for personal preference. Do not share your personal list; do not privatize the triage list.

Do not save one-off queries as views. Ad-hoc filtering exists for that, and a sidebar of forty views is the same problem as forty channels.

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Categories are the primary topic, set by AI

One category per ticket, assigned automatically. That constraint is the point: it forces a single answer to “what is this about”, which is what makes reporting and agent rules work. Get categories right by treating them as a classifier you are training, not a taxonomy you are designing:

• Start with 5 to 10. More than that and the AI starts guessing between neighbors.
• Make them non-overlapping. “Password Issues” and “Login Problems” will be picked at random. Combine them.
• Write descriptions for the classifier, not for humans. “Hardware issues including laptops, monitors, and peripherals” beats “Hardware”.
• Give 5 to 10 example phrases in the words your employees actually use. “I can’t access my email” and “Locked out of my account” train the model. “authentication failure” does not, because nobody types that.
• Read your default category weekly for the first month. Tickets piling up there are telling you which category is missing.

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Tags are everything else

Multiple per ticket, set manually, by AI, or by a workflow. Use them for the dimensions a category cannot carry: vip, needs-review, escalated, dns-outage. Two habits keep tags useful:

• Pick a naming convention and stick to it. Lowercase and hyphenated is fine. Without one you get VIP, vip, and Vip.
• Prune quarterly. Tags accumulate faster than anything else in the product, and a tag nobody filters by is noise in the picker.

Incident and campaign tags are the best use of tags, because they are inherently temporary and cut across categories.

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A worked decision

Someone asks: “Can we have a channel for laptop requests?” Walk it back against the three tests: If instead the answer had been “Facilities owns hardware and they have their own Slack channel”, that is a channel.

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