Organisations and projects

Two words carry most of Teralo's structure. An organisation is a company. A project is a job that company is working on. Everything else hangs off the relationship between them, and it is worth ten minutes at the start rather than ten confusing weeks.

Your organisation

Your organisation is your company's home in Teralo, and it is the thing that is signed up rather than you personally. It holds the details other organisations see (name, logo, address, ABN or company number), the people who work there, the standards your projects start from, and the subscription.

A person belongs to an organisation as a member, and the member record is what carries their permission template at organisation level. Members are added by an organisation administrator, or they apply to join and are approved. See Members and user applications.

Being a member of an organisation does not automatically put you on its projects. That is a second, deliberate step, because most people in a company are only on some of its jobs.

A project

A project is where the work happens: one job, one site, one contract. It has a name, a location, a type, dates and a project number, and it holds every record the job produces.

One organisation hosts many projects. One project can contain people from many organisations. That second half is the one people miss coming from single-company software: the subcontractors and consultants on a job are not visitors to it, they are members of it with their own accounts, lodging their own records into the same registers. The organisation that created the project is its host; the rest are guests. See Hosts and guests.

How you end up on a project

Somebody adds you. If you work for the host organisation, a project administrator adds you from the organisation's directory. If you work for a guest organisation, the host invites your organisation first and then the people in it, or your own administrator adds colleagues once the organisation is on.

Either way you are given a permission template as you are added, which is what decides the tools you see. Nobody is on a project without one. See Inviting people to a project.

Moving between them

The switcher at the top of the sidebar carries both levels. It names the project you are in and the organisation it belongs to, and opening it lets you change either. If you belong to more than one organisation, they are all in the same account and the same switcher; there is no second login and no separate profile.

Your personal dashboard is the screen behind all of them, listing the organisations you are a member of and the projects you are on. It is where a new browser session starts, and it is worth knowing that it can show projects as a list, as tiles, or on a map, which is genuinely useful once you are on more than a handful.

Inside a project, the project dashboard is the landing screen. Every project member can open it whatever their permissions are, so it is the one screen you can always rely on being there. See Dashboards.

Creating a project

Creating a project is a host action, done from the organisation dashboard. The organisation you create it from becomes its host, its tools are inherited from the organisation's own configuration, and its permission templates come from the ones your organisation has already written. That inheritance is the reason to set the organisation up properly before creating the first project rather than after. See Setting up your organisation.

While the setup is unfinished, a Getting started pill in the sidebar tracks what is still to be configured, so a half-finished setup is visible rather than something you discover when a tool does not work. It shows to the people who can act on it, the organisation's administrators and the host organisation's members on a project, and it disappears once everything is done.

Why some things exist at both levels

Your organisation has a document library and so does each project. Your organisation has a directory and so does each project. Six tools exist under the same name at both levels, and it is not duplication: the organisation holds the standard and the project holds the working copy. That pattern explains a lot of the navigation, and it has its own article. See Organisation level and project level.