Team pages help people working on the same team stay in sync and enable others to better understand their colleagues’ work. Each page allows teams to share a description of the work that they do, the best way to contact them, and who is on the team.

If you want to automatically create teams, they can be generated from the following data sources:

When you first set up teams from a given data source, you can provide Glean with a green list or red list of items that you want to ensure are included/excluded. For example, you could create all of the teams from the department field, except for the “external contractor” department. Or you could specify a set of specific Slack channels as the only ones you want turned into teams.

Teams can also be manually created by uploading a CSV of team data to Google Cloud Storage or by sending team data JSONs to the Glean Push API endpoint.

Team profile pages contain detailed information about a team. Each page has a set of components, including:

For easy discoverability, teams appear in the directory alongside people. Teams can be sorted by relevance, team size, and alphabetically by name. Teams can also be filtered by name. The screenshot below is what part of the teams directory looks like when sorted by relevance for an engineer on the Verticals team that works closely with Product. Clicking on a team links to the team profile page.

When a search query indicates the user is looking for a team, teams appear prominently in the results. Note that these teams appear as expandable cards and can be expanded to show a subset of up to 6 members. Clicking on this links to the team profile page.

When the user is in the middle of typing a query, team suggestions will appear if a team seems to be relevant to the user's partially completed query. Clicking on a team links to the team profile page.

Glean recommends using the team pages built into the product. This is an area of continued investment for us, and using teams pages now will set your company up for success as we roll out improvements in the future.

That said, companies with existing external team pages they wish to link to instead of Glean's team profile page can set that up. To set this up, admins need to submit teams through the push API or Google Cloud Storage. When that has been set up, teams profile pages can be overridden with an external link. If an external link exists, whenever a user clicks on a team in Glean, they will be directed to that external page. Note there is no way to go to the Glean team profile page if an external link is set.

Glean’s data shows that users frequently search for information about their colleagues and teams within their company. Building out teams pages will help answer those queries and keep everyone at your company on the same page. As Glean builds out additional teams functionality, your company will continue to benefit.

Glean recommends – at a minimum – setting up teams pages for every department. After that, we see additional value from creating teams that match your company’s internal structure, including individual functional teams (such as individual pods of developers, or individual sales roles) and other employee groups, like ERGs.

Once you have teams set up, Glean recommends enlisting individual team leads to update their teams’ contents, including photos, descriptions, and preferred contact methods. (Those leads are welcome to delegate those tasks as necessary, but they have the best context for what to create.) From there, users should begin seeing the teams pages as they use Glean normally.

Note that after teams are created, there will be a delay before they appear in Glean, and any changes in the original data source time to propagate to Glean. In general, this should take an average of 30 minutes, but may take slightly over an hour to complete in some circumstances.

Today, all members of a team can edit its contents, including the profile picture, banner, description and contact details. Glean is exploring other governance models for the future, and welcomes feedback on what would benefit your company.

Currently, teams can only be created through the methods listed above, but Glean is actively working to add that functionality to the product itself. Similarly, the ability to add and remove members from a team from the team’s page is planned on the roadmap.