We open sourced a library to template boards and integrate Miro into the company data flow.
Miro.com is an awesome online whiteboard for visual collaboration. We fall in love with it right when using it for the very first time!
Level 1: Scale up best practices with templates
Once we started adopting Miro, we learned that certain usage patterns work better than others. Instead of reinventing the wheel with each new board, we wanted to roll out our best practices. What we needed were templates.
Miro comes with a collection of pre-defined templates to get users started. Yet, we found that our specific use cases required more tailored templates. Although Miro doesn’t offer user-created templates as of today, Miro does have an API to programmatically create and query boards.
So, we set out to explored the API route. We encountered some challenges as the API supports only a subset of what the Miro UI can but by-and-large it turned out pretty well! We can design boards in the Miro UI, convert them into templates, and then generate many new Miro boards based on the template.
If you face the same challenge, we open sourced our tools as a library: https://github.com/Collaborne/miro-templating
Level 2: Let data flow through Miro
Once we had our boards templated, we realized that these boards don’t live in isolation. We typically use Miro to organize data that comes from somewhere else and afterwards we bring our results from Miro over to another place.
We therefore extended the library to allow pushing data in boards and to pull data out of boards . To push data, templates can have placeholders like ${PROJECT_NAME}, which are filled at the time when the board is created. To pull data, templates can mark target areas. All entered data within the target area gets extracted by the library.
With this, our Miro boards are no longer a disconnected part of our processes. Instead, data flows straight into Miro boards, where teams can collaborate based on these facts, and afterwards the results flow automatically back into our systems — as structured data.
Want to learn more? Check out the library on Github.
Happy coding!
The original article: https://medium.com/collaborne-engineering/templating-miro-com-boards-bac21271a7d9?source=friends_link&sk=b8b423bedec60517dd766f4ac7b8756
