You decided to improve your teamwork and got a Mindquarry account, either from the hosted "Mindquarry GO" or from the free download and you already have installed Mindquarry. (did you tell us about your installation in the voluntary registration form? Yes? very good. That helps us a lot to improve our services by knowing our customers) Anyway now you are ready for the first steps:

1. Initial Administration 

The first principle you have to learn is that a administrator is a  administrator and not a user. So after the installation you have the admin login(pwd admin/admin (if you are using Mindquarry GO you'll get your administarion account by email). As the admin you have the following initial tasks:

• add all possible users
• create the necessary team spaces
• add the first members to the according team

1.1 Add all possible Users

Go to the teams section. On the right side you'll see 2 buttons: "new user", "new team". Hit the new user button and a form appears, were you have to fill in the master data for the new user:

• User ID: this is the login-name. You cant that change lather, so use ID's according your common rules, f.e. email, name.surname, nicknames and so on.
• password: use something what is easy, the user can change that lather on his own.
• photo: this can be changed from the user lather on too, never than less I recommend to do that, if possible. It helps the users to feel confident.  The picture should be .jpg or .png format.  It should be quadratic with at least 48*48 pixels, but it can be bigger. The small sizes just load up faster. If you use bigger pictures, the will be resized to the appropriate format automatically.
  
• First name, surname: That should be the real names as long as you are not illegal criminals.
  
• Email: please use the correct email address of the user.
• Skills: that can be changed by the user too,  usually you can fill in descriptions of the role or position, like f.e. "CEO and lightning idol" for me.

Well now you have described your first user. Hitting the button "create" will save that for future use. But hold on a second. First I recommend to send that person an email with his access dates: the web-address were to login (look at your browsers current address) , the login name and his password. (Yes, it's already part of our road map to do this automated soon.) And now, finally, don't forget to hit the button "create".

And now you just have to do that for all users you plan to invite to your team spaces.

1.2 Add all wanted Teams

A team is the space were related people work on a project or a global task. Possible teams may be:

• departments, like Marketing, Finance, Human Resources ....
• projects, like "desktop client development", "coke summer campaign" or "collecting oncology data"
• global tasks (over different projects or departments), like "press wok" or "user reporting"

 
So you go to the teams section. On the right side you'll see 2 buttons: "new user", "new team". Hit the new team button and a form appears, were you have to fill in the master data for the new team:

• Teamspace ID: That should be considered carefully, since you can't change that lather on. The teamspace ID is used to have understandable web-URL's. So avoid difficult and too long names here. Avoid special characters of your local font set. Just keep it simple and understandable, like "financial" for the financial department.
• Teamspace name: That should be preferable the best describing name for your team. You can change that lather too.
• Description: It's always helpful to add some words to the task and goal of the team. But you can change that lather too.

Now hit the button "create team" and you'll done. Repeat that for possible other teams. Every created team should appear in the left navigation bar of the team section.

1.3 Adding Members to Teams

So you go again to the teams section. Go to a team of your choice by clicking it in the left navigation bar. Now the team name appears in the headline of your current page.  You'll see 2 new buttons: "Members" and "Edit". Hit the members button and a form appears, which has all possible members listed on the right side. just click to the "add members"-link in the peoples description and the people will be added to the current team. You added a wrong person? Don't worry, just hit the "remove" link in the persons description on the left team side, and it will go back to the peoples pool. When you adjusted all users to the current team, hit the save button to save your work.

And now do the same procedure for every other team. This part of the administration work can later be done by the team members itself.

 1.4 Further Administration Tasks

Adding Teams and  Team members will always be a task which can be done only by the administrator.

Well that's the stuff for today. Stay tuned for the next article about the basic principles of Mindquarry.

Posted at 12:09PM Jul 13, 2007 (Permalink) by Stephan Voigt with tags collaboration first-steps howto mindquarry  |  Share This Link