Curious to test Tana for meetings? Here's a guide to how it differs from Tana Outliner

The most used feature in Tana Outliner is the Meeting Notetaker. So when we built the new Tana, we took it and put it front and center.

The new Tana is not a new version of Tana Outliner. It is built around meetings and the work that comes out of them: the briefs before, the suggestions during, and the follow-up after. If you love Tana Outliner for your personal knowledge system, you can keep it. This guide covers what is different, and how the two fit together.

Your meetings, front and center

Tana works with the meeting tool you already use. Keep running your calls in Google Meet, Zoom or Teams, and start capture from the meeting in Tana. There is no bot joining the call.

Before a call, Tana can brief you on the people you are about to meet and what you talked about last time. During the call, it suggests things to do as they come up, such as adding a task or a follow-up. After the call, you get a summary, with decisions and action items linked back to the meeting they came from.

One engineering team told us they run meetings that switch between Norwegian, English and Japanese, and the summaries still come out right.

Chat with your meetings, during and after

Tana Outliner captured the context of your meetings. The new Tana lets you work with it while the meeting is still going.

Ask the chat things like:

• "What did we decide about pricing last week?"
• "What themes keep coming up with this client across our sessions?"
• "Write a short summary of this call that I can share with the team."
• "Turn the action items into tasks and assign them."

A coach we spoke with used Tana Outliner to spot patterns across coaching sessions. In the new Tana, that is a question to the chat, across every session at once.

You don't have to configure where things go. Tell the chat in plain language where something belongs, or let it suggest a place. When AI wants to change something, it sends a proposal that you accept or reject, so nothing changes behind your back.

If you can't find something, ask

Tana Outliner shows you all of its mechanics: nodes, fields, supertags and search queries. The new Tana keeps more of that out of sight, which can feel strange at first. One Tana Outliner user put it as "I don't know where anything is."

The habit to build is this: in the new Tana, start by asking the chat. Ask it to find something, set something up, or explain what you are looking at.

Love what you've built in Tana Outliner? Keep it there

If you have years of notes, supertags and workflows in Tana Outliner and it works for you, keep it. Connect the new Tana to Tana Outliner through MCP, and the chat in the new Tana can read from and write to your Tana Outliner graph. See Connect Tana to Tana Outliner for the setup.

Some teams use both. One team we spoke with keeps its structured prototype and safety test records in Tana Outliner, where engineers have built detailed supertags, and uses the new Tana for meetings and the people who don't want to learn Tana Outliner.

Found Tana Outliner too complex? Start fresh

Many people told us they loved the idea of Tana Outliner but never got it set up the way they wanted. If that is you, the new Tana is an easier place to start. Bring your context across and you will find simpler versions of the ideas Tana Outliner pioneered:

• Types are the supertags you know. Ask the chat to create one, such as "a Client type with company, goals and next session."
• Spaces are folders for a team, project or client. They decide who can see what, and they tell AI where to look. They are not the same as workspaces in Tana Outliner.
• Skills are reusable instructions for AI. If you had an AI command that reviewed your work after each session, you can write it as a skill and run it whenever you like.

Bring the agent you already use, if you want to

You can connect Claude or ChatGPT as your own agent, and it can then work with your meetings and tasks in Tana. This is optional. The chat in Tana works on its own, so if you would rather not give another AI tool access to your meetings, you don't have to.

Try it with your next meeting

1. Open your next meeting in Tana and start capture. Keep using Google Meet, Zoom or Teams for the call.
2. Accept a live suggestion during the call.
3. After the call, ask the chat for a summary you can share.
4. Ask a question across your past meetings, such as what is still open.
5. If you want your Tana Outliner notes in the mix, connect Tana Outliner through MCP.