Use cases and shaping orboto to your work

orboto is not limited to one profession. It is built from a few blocks that any team can use for its own kind of work: projects that hold tickets, statuses you name yourself, docs next to the work, time tracking, customers and guests for people outside your team, and AI agents that work beside people. What a ticket stands for - a bug, a blog post, a support case, a new hire, a deal - is up to you.

Tickets come in four types in every project: task, bug, story and epic. The words that describe your work go into statuses, labels, milestones and templates, which you set yourself. The second half of this page lists those parts.

This page does three things:

• It names kinds of work and says which parts of orboto each one uses.
• It says what you set up yourself. Nothing here switches on by itself.
• It lists the parts you can adapt, with a link to the page that explains each.

Every part named on this page is built into orboto today and linked to its page. Creating a first project takes about fifteen minutes: see Your first project.

Kinds of work

Software and game development

Uses: one set of tickets shown as a Kanban board, a list, a backlog, a Gantt chart or a network diagram (Projects and tickets); milestones for sprints, builds or release phases (Milestones and alerts); versions and releases; commits and pull requests that appear on the ticket when a repository is connected (Git integration, for GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps, Bitbucket, Gitea, Forgejo or SSH); burndown and velocity (Analytics); cycle time and delivery forecasts (Flow, cycle time and forecasting); the critical path through ticket dependencies.

You set up: a project per product or game, the repository connection (an administrator registers the GitHub App or GitLab OAuth application once, the project owner connects the repository), statuses such as QA or Deployed, and milestones for your stages. A game is a project like any other: use labels for disciplines such as art, audio, code and design, and a doc space for design documents. The Software Development starter template gives you a board and sprint milestones to start from (see Project templates).

Agencies and client work

Uses: customers that group projects, with a logo, a default hourly rate, a billing address and a primary contact; guests who see only the milestones you open to them; time tracking and timesheets; budgets in hours and money with per-person cost (Budget and cost tracking); a customer report or requirements specification as PDF, Word or Markdown (Requirements documents and reports); portfolios that roll up several projects; Lexware Office, which turns a customer's billable time into a draft invoice.

You set up: a customer per client (with a customer role for every outside person you add), the projects linked to it, which milestones are visible to guests, hourly rates and the project budget, and one template per type of engagement. The Lexware connection is made by an administrator and needs a Lexware Office account.

Customer support and service desks

Uses: inbound email that lands in orboto as tickets and is routed to the right project; a status such as Waiting on Customer; response and resolution targets per priority, escalation ladders and on-call rotations (Alerts and SLA); alert rules for tickets that are stuck or overdue; customers and guests, where guests see the milestones you open to them and the tickets they created themselves; duplicate protection and related-ticket hints (Working with tickets); automatic translation of tickets written in another language, which needs an AI provider.

You set up: the way mail reaches orboto (an administrator picks one of four paths), the targets and the on-call rotation, and the board. The Customer Support starter template gives you the statuses New, Triaged, In Progress, Waiting on Customer, Resolved and Closed, and priority labels.

Marketing and content

Uses: statuses as the content pipeline, for example Idea, Drafting, In Review, Scheduled and Published (Workflows and statuses); labels for channels; milestones as campaign phases; approval gates, so a piece cannot move to Published without sign-off from the people you name; doc spaces for briefs and style guides; the calendar feed for due dates in your own calendar.

You set up: the statuses, the approvers of the gate and the doc spaces. The Marketing Campaign starter template has the pipeline above, channel labels and monthly milestones.

HR and onboarding

Uses: a template with milestones counted in days from a start date, starter tickets and doc pages, which you apply for each new hire; checklists whose items carry their own assignee and due date; private tickets for confidential matters; absences with approval, a team calendar and public holidays, counted in working days; capacity; single sign-on and SCIM, so joiners get accounts and leavers lose access automatically.

You set up: the onboarding template, the absence types and public holidays (an administrator), and the roles that decide who sees what.

Sales pipelines

Uses: statuses as stages, for example Lead, Qualified, Proposal, Won and Lost, shown as Kanban columns. Give Won the Done category and Lost the Won't Fix category, so lost deals are not counted as delivered work (Workflows and statuses). One customer per account, with billing address, primary contact and notes; an approval gate before a stage such as Proposal; a saved search pinned to the dashboard for your open deals; inbound email for enquiries that arrive by mail, and the n8n form template, which turns a form entry into a ticket.

You set up: the stage statuses, one ticket per deal with the deal details in its description, a customer per account and the saved search.

Operations and IT

Uses: tickets for requests and incidents; approval gates as change approval; on-call rotations and escalation ladders; SLA policies and alert rules; a risk register, decision records and a control catalog; the audit log; backups; an encrypted credential vault; webhooks and the API to connect monitoring and other systems.

You set up: statuses and gate policies, rotations, the webhooks or API keys for your tools, and the backup destination.

Research

Uses: doc spaces for notes, protocols and findings, with live links to tickets; import of PDF, Word, Markdown and text files or a web page; search across tickets, docs and comments, and Ask AI, which answers from your docs with references to the source pages; the living wiki, which flags pages that have gone stale; tickets and milestones for experiments and study phases; time tracking.

You set up: the space structure and, for Ask AI and semantic search, an AI provider (an administrator, see AI providers and models).

Events

Uses: a template per type of event, with milestones counted in days from the day you start preparing; Gantt view and critical path for the schedule; RACI, so each task has exactly one accountable person; checklists for the steps inside a task; a budget in hours and money; guests (vendors, partners) who see only the milestones you open to them (Customers and guests).

You set up: the template, RACI switched on for the project, the budget, and the guest access per milestone.

Personal planning

Uses: one project for yourself, on the Simple starter template (To Do, Doing, Done and the labels Personal, Work and Urgent); the dashboard with your tickets, upcoming deadlines and saved searches; the Time Calendar to plan and log time; the calendar feed for due dates in your own calendar; the AI assistant.

You set up: one project and your dashboard widgets.

Teams of people and AI agents

Uses: agents with their own accounts and the same permissions as people (Agents & AI); MCP to connect AI clients such as Claude Desktop or Cursor; work routing, where an agent pulls the best ready ticket under an exclusive lease, a human label keeps agents off a ticket and an agent:<tag> label prefers one agent; review lanes, which never hand an agent a ticket it implemented itself; the agent inbox for messages between agents and people; the in-app AI assistant; admin controls for onboarding, presence and pausing; how work splits between people and agents (Estimation, collaboration and activity, Executive dashboard).

You set up: an agent connection and its account. Agents run on your own machines or servers and connect to orboto: Connect your agent is the first hour, Your first AI worker takes about ten minutes, and Run an agent fleet covers servers.

Shape orboto to your work

Where to go next