In my previous guidelines I was summarizing up the first steps for administrators and the basic principles of the Mindquarry collaboration way. To recapitulate, we learned ho the administrator is setting up teams and users and whats the idea behind the file section, the wiki and the tasks. Now it's your turn, team members. Are you ready?

Well although some of you might yelling "I'm ready, I'm ready" like yellow squares, there are still some pieces of advice left: So sit tight and read on.

3.  A "Howto" for first day Mindquarry users 

Now you got your login and you are eger to use Mindquarry. You already logged in. You'll arrived at the landing page for first users. It looks nice (at least some think so) with it's fat icons for each functionality: teams, files, wiki, tasks and (soon) talk.  Now take a close look to that beauty, because you'll perhaps never again run into that page. ;-) I'll tell you lather why.

I recommend to start at the team page, just to get a overview about your initial rights and settings. Hit the fat red team button.

3.1 teams: your initial rights

 You'll arrive at the "all your teams page" This is the best page for newbies because most things you can do have the same result: you can choose your current team by either selecting it from the center of the page, from the left navigation bar or from the list box in your navigation button, labeled "all your teams" above the page title.

Why should you choose a team?

Each team has it's own workspace with a on wiki, a own file section, own tasks and own team members. You can work much more focussed by having just the necessary resources for one team You can change your team workspace at any time and in every section by select a new team from the left navigation bar or from the list box in your navigation button, labeled "all your teams" above the page title.

Do I see every team?

No. You see just the teams were you are in. If you think you should participate on other teams (if there are other teams) you can be added by any of the appendant team members or the administrator.

 3.2 teams: your initial user settings

Now choose a team. The page headline become the team name and you see a short description of the team objectives (if your administrator created one)  and a list of all team members. They all should be there, Jack Jones, Kate King, Linda Lobster ... and You. But what is that? Most of them have a nice picture and you got that 10 years old graduation picture?  Your description says you are "a c++ programmer" but you are already "a ruby-on-rails expert"? Don't worry! Look at the almost upper right corner. There are 3 small icons, and the middle one is looking like a business card. Don' hesitate and click on it. Now you are in the "change user profile form". I explained a similar form already in my first article chapter "1.1 Add all possible users". Here you can change your photo (The picture should be .jpg or .png format.  It should be quadratic with at least 48*48 pixels, but it can be bigger). You can change your password and last not least your skill description.  So you load up a pretty cool picture with your new hairstyle and you overwrite "a c++ programmer" with "a ruby-on-rails expert". Now click the "change profile" button so save your changes. If you changed your password, save the changes with "change password".

3.3 Set up your file section

In chapter "2.2 Files" you've probably learned about the collaboration server. Each time you synchronize, you get a copy of your team files. But how to upload the first files to the server?  A catch22 ? No, it's that easy: 

The first team space user creates on his desktop a file directory (like c:/teams/marketing for the marketing team) with all sub-directories and files the according team space should contain and then just sync your desktop with your Mindquarry server. All files and sub-directories will be uploaded.  Now all the other team members with just an empty "c:/teams/marketing" synchronize too and get the files and subdirectories downloaded. Now they may add some more files and sync again and so on.

(Note: Instead of "c:/teams/marketing" can every team member have a different location like "c:/documents/marketing" or "d:/teams/documents/marketing" as long as that is the location they used as local storage path during the desktop client installation: "c:/teams/", or "c:/documents/" or "d:/teams/documents/". ) If you are a member of other teams too, like Sales, the local sales files pace is in the same local path, like "c:/teams/sales".

 3.4 Create a welcome wiki page

In each team or project is often a keeper. (lucky if you have one) This part is for those kind of team members.

I suggest to initiate a kind of "welcome wiki page" Describe the teams goals and objective, create a page for rules or a glossary if you have such stuff, start a FAQ page with initial hints for using the wiki or the Mindquarry desktop client. Create a code of conduct page or whatever comes you in mind to help to promote your teams work. By doing that, you'll give your team mates examples of how to use the wiki and some familiarness with the new software as well. Most people need help in mastering a new software environment. We at Mindquarry can do efforts, to keep it easy to use. But to make your team collaboration project a success story we need you.

3.5 Anything else 

So now you are ready. Go and try it your way. There is nothing you can do really wrong:

You deleted a file by accident. No problem: go to the file section in your team space, grab the time-slider and go to the last version. double click it and it will be loaded (or downloaded) now safe it and with the next sync it will be uploaded for everyone's use again.

Why will you never see the initial landing page?

I suppose you will set a bookmark to a wiki or a team page. In your daily work there is no need for going back to here.  It's just a beauty page for first time users.

So thats for now, folks. I would be glad for your feedback. A great place is here: Submit your user experience. Or write a comment to that post. Or email me at stephan(dot)voigt(at)mindquarry(dot)com

Posted at 05:21PM Jul 17, 2007 (Permalink) by Stephan Voigt with tags collaboration collaboration2.0 firststeps guide howto  |  Share This Link