Overview

Windshift is a self-hosted work management platform for teams that want one place to plan, track, and discuss work.

Use this guide if you use Windshift day to day. It explains the product concepts, common workflows, and how to get work from an idea to done.

Workspace list in Windshift

What you can do in Windshift

Windshift covers the full lifecycle of work in one platform:

  • Create workspaces for teams, products, customers, or initiatives
  • Track tasks, bugs, ideas, and requests as work items
  • Plan and deliver with backlogs, boards, lists, trees, calendars, and roadmaps
  • Group related work in collections defined by a query
  • Link related work items together
  • Organize delivery with milestones and iterations (sprints, releases)
  • Log time against work items, projects, and customers, with a built-in timer
  • Manage test cases, test sets, test runs, and reports next to the work they validate
  • Publish customer portals so external users can submit and follow up on requests
  • Keep knowledge pages next to the work they describe

Key concepts

Workspaces

A workspace is a self-contained place where a team manages related work. Most teams create one workspace per product, customer engagement, department, or major initiative. A workspace has its own backlog, board, item types, workflow, custom fields, members, tests, pages, and settings.

Work items

A work item is anything your team needs to track. Item types are configurable (for example Bug, Story, Task, Epic), each with its own icon, colour, fields, and workflow. Work items can be linked together and arranged in parent-child hierarchies, so an Epic can contain Stories, Stories can contain Tasks, and so on.

Views

A view is a way to look at the same work. The board shows flow by status. The backlog helps with prioritisation. The list is dense and sortable. The tree shows hierarchy. The calendar shows scheduled work on a weekly grid. The roadmap shows milestones and iterations across time.

Collections

Collections are saved queries written in CQL (Collection Query Language). Unlike a folder, a collection does not store items: it describes them. As work items match or stop matching the query, the collection updates automatically. A single collection can drive a board, list, calendar, or roadmap.

Collections are how you build things like "release candidates," "customer escalations," or "frontend work in progress" without manually maintaining a list. See Collections for details, including how they compare to Jira filters.

Workflows

Workflows describe the statuses a work item can move through (for example To Do, In Progress, Review, Done) and the allowed transitions between them. Statuses belong to status categories so the same colour-coding applies across workspaces. Workflows are built visually and assigned per workspace.

Iterations and milestones

Iterations are time-boxed buckets of work (sprints, releases, or your own iteration type). Milestones are dated goals that work items roll up into. Both are used for delivery planning and progress reporting.

Configuration

Item types, workflows, statuses, fields, screens, and permissions are configurable. Admins use configuration sets to apply a consistent setup across workspaces.

Where to start

If you are new to Windshift, start with Your First Project, then read Work Items and Boards and Backlogs.

If you administer Windshift

Installation, deployment, authentication, plugins, and server configuration live in the Self-hosting guide.