A brief summary of our Outliner Remote MCP Systems Lab: how to connect Tana to Tana Outliner, and how the two tools work together once the connection is live. Remote MCP is the hosted version of the Outliner MCP server, so Tana reaches your graph over the internet with the desktop app closed.
Use Connect Tana to Tana Outliner for the written setup steps, and watch the longer Systems Lab for the full walkthrough and discussion.
We'll cover:
- Connecting the hosted server in Tana, and checking which Outliner tools arrived
- Querying your graph from a Tana chat, and turning what it finds into documents
- Reaching Outliner during a meeting, and sending the outcome back into your graph
How to connect Outliner Remote MCP in Tana [0:31]
A one-time setup with no token to manage and nothing to keep running. In Tana, open Settings, go to Custom MCP servers, and click Add server. Paste the Tana Outliner hosted URL, give it a display name you will recognize in chat, and authorize the connection. Connecting adds a linked skill for the server whose individual tools you can allow or deny.
Using Outliner from a Tana chat [1:35]
A good first prompt is asking what Tana Outliner tools it has. It can list workspaces, search nodes with the same query structure you use in Outliner, read a node and walk its children and parents, and read or edit supertags and their fields. Each tool call shows in the chat as it runs.
Generating Tana documents from Outliner nodes [4:30]
Ask the AI to gather the context around something in your graph and write it up as a document in Tana. It follows the references around the node you named rather than reading only that node, so what comes back is a synthesized brief rather than a list of links.
Using Outliner during a Tana meeting [6:25]
The meeting's private chat can reach Outliner mid call. When the conversation touches a decision or project you wrote up months ago, ask for it and add a short summary to the meeting notes, without leaving the call.
Sending content to Outliner from Tana [9:40]
The connection runs both ways. Ask Tana to send an outcome back under a specific node in Outliner and it creates the content there, including tagged nodes, field values, and todos on today's day node. Name the destination and the supertag, so what lands is a properly structured node rather than a loose bullet to file later.