Concepts and glossary

The vocabulary orboto uses - projects, tickets, milestones, and every other term you meet as you learn the product.

Welcome to orboto - a place for teams to plan work, track it, and talk about it. This guide is written for the people who use orboto every day: it explains, task by task, how to get things done. You do not need to be technical to follow it.

If you are brand new, start with Getting started and Your first project. Otherwise, jump straight to the chapter you need, or use this page as a reference glossary whenever a term is unfamiliar.

A note on what you can see. What appears in your sidebar and on your screens depends on your role and permissions. If this guide describes a button or page you cannot find, your workspace administrator has not granted you access to it. That is normal - it is not a fault. Administrator-only features (managing users, single sign-on, imports, backups, and so on) are covered separately; this guide points to that material where relevant rather than duplicating it.

Getting started - signing in, the layout of the screen, themes, language, and keyboard shortcuts.
Your first project - a hands-on walkthrough: create a project, add a ticket, move it across the board.
Your dashboard - your personal home page and its widgets.
Projects and tickets - the core: projects, the five board views, and everything a ticket can do.
Search - global search, the query language, saved searches, and AI search.
Docs and wiki - spaces, pages, smart links, sharing, and asking questions of your docs.
Time tracking - the stopwatch, time calendar, timesheets, absences, and capacity.
Planning and alerts - milestones, versions, project templates, and alert rules.
Analytics - burndown, velocity, flow metrics, forecasting, and earned value.
Notifications - the inbox, preferences, and chat channels.
Account and security - your profile, password, two-factor authentication, passkeys, and sessions.
AI assistant - the built-in chat assistant and the AI features across the product.
Customers and guests - external organisations and the guest experience.
Integrations - connecting AI clients, code repositories, and chat tools, plus admin pointers.
Requirements documents and reports - making a project ready for a requirements specification (Pflichtenheft) and a customer report, and which project data fills which chapter.

How the pieces fit together

Before the glossary, the short version of how everything nests:

Workspace - your whole orboto instance, shared by your team.
- Project (key ACME) - a container for related work.
  - Milestone - a checkpoint (a phase, a sprint) that groups tickets toward a date.
  - Ticket (key ACME-42) - one unit of work, living in exactly one project and optionally one milestone.
    - Comments, checklists, attachments, and time entries all live on a ticket.
  - Doc space - a folder of documentation pages that can reference the project's tickets via smart links.

Everything else in the glossary below is a property of, or an action on, one of these.

Glossary

Core work items

Project - a container for related work, with a short key (for example ACME) that prefixes its tickets.
Ticket - one unit of work: a task, a bug, a story, or an epic. Identified by a key like ACME-42.
Task - a ticket type for a standalone unit of work with no further breakdown.
Bug - a ticket type for something that is broken and needs fixing.
Story - a ticket type for a piece of user-facing functionality, often broken down into smaller tasks.
Epic - a ticket type for a large piece of work that groups several smaller tickets under it as children.
Status - the stage a ticket is in (for example To Do, In Progress, Done); the columns on the Kanban board. Configurable per project.
Priority - how urgent a ticket is (for example blocker, high, normal, low, trivial).
Label - a coloured tag you attach to tickets to categorise them.
Assignee - a person responsible for a ticket. A ticket can have several.
Checklist - a list of smaller steps on a ticket; an item can link to another ticket so it ticks itself off when that ticket closes.
Parent / sub-ticket - a ticket can have a parent and children, for breaking an epic or story into smaller pieces.
Dependency - a relationship where one ticket blocks or is blocked by another.
RACI - a way to record who is Responsible (does the work), Accountable (owns the outcome), Consulted (gives input), and Informed (kept in the loop).

Board views

Kanban - a board of cards in status columns that you drag work across.
List - a compact, sortable, groupable table of tickets.
Gantt - a timeline view placing tickets by their start and due dates, with dependency links drawn between bars.
Network - a diagram of tickets connected by their dependencies - the fastest way to spot a blocker chain.

Planning

Milestone - a meaningful checkpoint in a project (a phase, a sprint, a deliverable) that groups tickets toward a shared goal and date. Key form: ACME-M3.
Version - a planned release of your product, with a target release date, bundling the work shipped together.
Template - a reusable project or milestone structure you can apply to a new project.
Alert - an automatic warning that fires when something needs attention (a deadline at risk, a budget nearing its limit).

Time and capacity

Timesheet - your logged time for a period, gathered for approval.
Absence - a period of time off (holiday, sick leave, and so on), counted in working days.
Capacity - the available working time a person has, compared against assigned and logged time.

Analytics

Velocity - how much work the team completes per period; used to plan future work.
Cycle time - how long a ticket takes from start to done.
Burndown - a chart of remaining work over time against an ideal line.
Cumulative flow diagram - a chart of how many tickets sit in each status over time, showing where work piles up.
Delivery forecast - a projected completion range and confidence level for a set of tickets, based on your team's actual pace.
Earned value (EVM) - a standard method for checking whether progress matches the schedule and spend it should have bought.

Knowledge

Space - a folder of related documentation pages.
Doc - a single documentation page, written with the same rich-text editor as tickets.
Smart link - a live link (typed with [[) to a ticket, doc, project, or milestone that always shows the target's current title.
Ask AI - a panel that answers a question about your docs, with links back to the source pages it used.

Notifications

Notification - a message telling you something happened to your work, delivered in-app, by email, or to a chat channel.
Notification channel - an external destination (such as a chat tool) subscribed to receive notifications, configured per workspace.

Security and access

Role - the set of permissions assigned to a member; what you can see and do is derived from it.
Permission - a single granted capability (for example, creating projects or managing users).
Two-factor authentication (2FA) - a second sign-in step beyond your password, using an authenticator app or a passkey.
Passkey - a sign-in method using your device's fingerprint, face, or PIN instead of a code.
Single sign-on (SSO) - signing in through your organisation's central identity provider.
Guest / external user - someone outside your team given narrow access to specific shared content.

AI and integrations

AI assistant - the in-app chat assistant that can answer questions and take actions on your behalf, with your confirmation.
MCP (Model Context Protocol) - the standard that lets AI clients such as Claude Desktop or Cursor connect to orboto.

Troubleshooting

A term in this guide doesn't match what I see in the app - for example, my board has no "To Do" column. Cause: statuses and workflows are configurable per project, so an administrator may have renamed, reordered, or removed a default one. Fix: check the project's Settings → Statuses tab, or ask whoever manages the project.