Introducing: Collections

Today we’re launching a new way to organize and share projects in Hex: Collections.

Collections are groups of projects that can be created, populated, and shared by users in a workspace. They make organizing data work more clear, secure, and collaborative. They also make it easier for the entire org to find the reports and insights they need. It's a huge upgrade to how teams work together and collaborate in Hex!

Check out a quick demo here, or read on below:

Creating a collection is easy— just pick a name, select an emoji, and set who can manage it. You can then add existing projects to the collection or create new ones inside of it. Best of all, you can share the entire collection with your team with a click or two.

One project, many collections

Unlike a traditional file directory, Hex projects can live in multiple collections. This allows for flexible organization structures that mimic how data teams work and prevent projects getting siloed with the wrong level of access.

When adding a project to a collection, you have the option to share, view, or edit permissions with all collection members, ensuring that your team can stay in sync with the latest and greatest insights— but you don't have to.

Many permissions, one collection

One of the main challenges with organizing data work is that logically you want to put projects with very different levels of access in the same category. ie Sales - Pipeline and Sales - Commissions.

With collections, you're not forced to choose between access and logical organization. You can put both projects in the same collection, while maintaining separate levels of permissions for each project.

This flexible permissions model ensures the right people — and only the right people — have easy access to the apps they need.

How Hex Uses Collections

Many Hex workspaces have hundreds of projects — including our own. It’s easy to use Hex to create insightful data stories, operational dashboards, and quick explorations of data. At Hex, we create more than 100 projects a month on average (granted many are ad hoc and rightfully never see the light of day).

With so many projects, it can be hard to find what you’re looking for. What was that project called again? Who made it? How long ago did I make that? Did I put a category on it? Oh wait, did I put [Customer] in the title?

We needed a simple way to organize our projects so that they were easy to discover and we weren’t having to individually grant access whenever we shared work with our teammates.

The framework we developed has been dubbed Teams and Themes (feel free to steal)!

Teams

We have collections for each of our teams at Hex. These collections have high level dashboards, reports that track key metrics, and apps that support the everyday operational needs of the team. We use groups to ensure the right people have access to their team collection. Team collections act as a home in Hex for a particular team — their most frequently used projects are all in one place.

Themes

Themes represent an area of focus or a cross functional initiative such as user activation or feature usage. Access to theme collections can be open to the entire org, or restricted to specific groups depending on the sensitivity of the data.

With teams and themes collections, it’s easy for our team to find their work and collaborate.

Get started with collections today

Collections are now available on all paid plans of Hex. Customers on our professional plan can make up to 3 shared collections. Customers on our teams and enterprise plans can create unlimited collections.

If you’re not using Hex yet, you can start a free-forever account here.