Managing content on multiple boards at once

[Susan Puckett]

Scenario: I want to create multiple boards with company-level onboarding tasks and department-level onboarding tasks.  The company-level onboarding tasks are all the same, and the department-level onboarding tasks would be different per board.  

Question: If I updated the content on either the company-level lists or cards, is there a way to automatically updated the identical cards on the other boards OR could I copy just the card/list content to the other boards OR would I have to add them manually?  (I don't want to copy the whole board as the boards will have differing department-level content and I don't want to have to manually update 10 or so boards.)

Ideas?

[Hannah Humbert - Simpla Workflows · Accepted solution]

Another option is to look into Unito's workflow solution https://unito.io/integrations/trello-trello/ 

All you would do is connect the relevant boards together, and choose to sync all cards, or you could filter it so only a subset of cards sync. It's completely bidirectional, so an update made on one card will reflect on the other, and vice-versa. 

[KOHESION]

Hi @Hannah Humbert - Simpla Workflows I've been trying out Unito to sync all my client boards together (they make new job cards and they show up on my main job management board) No clients have access to each others boards or my main board. Issue is, Unito charge per active user - so, if you add members to cards, it can quickly get VERY expensive. I was wondering if you used Unito and have found a way to sync without this issue?!

[Hannah Humbert - Simpla Workflows]

@KOHESION yes, that's right - any member who creates cards, comments, or is added as a member to a card will be picked up as an active user. You can disable some active users in your workspace settings, so that means they will no longer be counted towards your billing. However, if a user who has been disabled gets added as a member to a card, that card will no longer sync. 

So, if there are some users in your Trello boards who are being detected as active users due to creating cards/commenting, but they're not actually being assigned to work, you could disable them as active users. 

[Iain Dooley · Accepted solution]

@Susan Puckett okay so you can do this with API automation, but it's reasonably involved. I'll describe how to do this using the Trellinator framework in my BenkoBot platform.

One way to skin this particular cat would be to have a board called "Company Level Onboarding Template" and then multiple boards for each Department Level Onboarding, eg. "Sales Department Onboarding Template".

Then you have a function that will create a department on-boarding template by copying the cards from the company level one, and the appropriate department level one, by creating a card in the appropriate list on a board called "Onboarding Overview".

So for starters, on your Overview board, you have this function installed on your "overview" board:

https://gist.github.com/iaindooley/c9683d0f9487d008c8656941ea8f2840

Then, so long as the names of your cards in your Onboarding lists don't change, and the names of your lists don't change, you could install functions on your Company Onboarding Template to update all the boards when you make particular types of changes. The only change you couldn't synch is a title change, since we're using title to find and update cards (if the title changes it will just create a new card).

Here's a function to update for new cards:

https://gist.github.com/iaindooley/379478c8c950735725efc7bd3ef8967e

You'd then need a separate function to update for changed descriptions, create a new card for changed titles, link new attachments, synch checklists and so on.

This could all run under our BenkoBot platform:

http://www.benkobot.com/

So yes, definitely doable with API automation. I'm sure there would need to be some tweaks as well, for example protecting list names in the linked board so that if someone accidentally changes them it changes back and things like that to minimise the risk of breaking the synch.

Another thing that occurs to me is that you could link the cards in the created onboarding boards back to their template cards which would enable you to cope with title changes by finding the cards they were originally created from.