After accessing Lab Builder, the Lab Builder dashboard appears. This dashboard gives you an overview of the custom labs in your organization and their states.

The dashboard provides the entry point to:

• Create a new lab
• Manage your custom labs by viewing which are published, in a draft state, or have been archived. 

Creating a new lab

To create a new lab:

• On the top of the Lab Builder Dashboard, click + Create a new custom lab. 

For each custom lab, there are three primary steps that are used to customize the lab. These steps can be accessed from the Lab properties panel. 

• Configuring lab details.
• Using the Briefing panel editor to provide users with the essential background knowledge they need before diving into hands-on tasks.
• Creating tasks that learners must complete to finish a lab.

Note: You can work on or complete these steps in any order; there is not a dependency to complete them in order.

From any of the Lab properties pages, in the upper right corner, you can see who the name of the person who authored this lab, when it was last edited, and the date it was created

Dashboard tabs

The Lab Builder dashboard contains the following tabs:

• Published labs
• Draft labs
• Archived labs

Published labs tab

The Published labs tab displays all of the labs that have been published to your organization. A published lab effectively means it's "findable" by your organization on the platform. 

By default, published labs are not added to any collection. While single labs can be published and assigned to users, we recommend adding labs to collections, which can be assigned to sub-categories, since sub-categories can be easily found through navigation. This is covered in more detail in Adding Custom Labs to Custom Collections.

The Published labs tab of the dashboard displays high-level information about each lab, including the title, author, and last edited date. It also allows you to quickly edit labs by clicking Edit. 

The dashboard view also gives you insight into any alerts that may be of interest. In the image above, for example, a published lab was edited, but these edits have not been published.

Draft labs tab

The Draft labs tab provides insight into any labs that have been created but have not yet been published. Think of this section as your "Work in progress" area. 

If you exit a lab before publishing it, it is saved and added to the Draft labs tab.

To continue building a lab, simply click the Edit button next to a draft lab. 

Archived labs tab

The Archived labs tab contains any labs that have been archived. Any labs that are archived are removed from the platform and put into this tab for reference.

Note: Even if a lab is archived, any user who had previously completed this lab will keep their points.

Archiving a lab

Archiving a lab effectively means the lab is deleted. Archived labs cannot be unarchived, so we only recommend using this functionality when you want to permanently remove a lab. 

Labs can be archived from both the Published labs and Draft labs tabs.

To archive a lab: 

• In row for the lab that you want to archive, click ... > Archive.