Your first week on a project

You have been invited to a project and you would like to be useful by Friday. This is the short version: get in, find your work, make sure it finds you.

Getting in

Almost everybody arrives through an invitation email. Open it, follow the link, and you are taken to a sign-up page with your email address already filled in. Add your name, choose a password, and confirm the email address when the verification message arrives. If you already have a Teralo account, sign in instead and the invitation attaches to it.

Two things go wrong at this point and both are easy. The invitation lands in a spam folder more often than it should, so look there before assuming it was never sent. And an invitation is issued to one email address: signing up with a different one creates an account the invitation does not know about. If either has happened, ask whoever invited you to send it again. See Troubleshooting.

You can also be added directly, without an invitation, if you already work for an organisation that is on the project. In that case the project simply appears.

Fill in your profile before you do anything else

It takes two minutes and it saves other people guessing who you are. A photo, your job title, your trade and a phone number. On a project with four organisations and forty people, a directory entry with a face and a role on it is the difference between being contacted and being worked around.

While you are there, turn on two-factor authentication. See Your profile and Security and two-factor authentication.

Finding your way around

Signing in lands you on your personal dashboard, which lists the organisations you belong to and the projects you are on. Opening a project takes you to its own dashboard, and that is the screen you can always get back to whatever your permissions are.

The sidebar down the left is the project's tools, grouped the way the work is grouped. What is in it depends on the permission template you were given, so it is shorter for some people than others, and a tool that is not there is not broken. The switcher at the top changes project or organisation.

Two more things in the sidebar are worth finding on day one. My Items is everything waiting on you, with a count beside it. Search, or Ctrl and K, jumps to a person, a document or a tool without navigating to it.

Then learn the register. Nearly every tool opens on the same table with the same toolbar, so filtering, grouping and saving a view is one skill rather than twenty. See Registers and the data table and My Items.

Understanding what you are allowed to do

Your access comes from a permission template assigned to you when you were added, with a name like Subcontractor, Site Manager or Document Controller. It decides which tools you see and what you can do in them.

If something you expected is missing, check you are on the right project first, since permissions differ between them. If it is still missing, ask the host to adjust your template; the change takes effect the next time you open the project. See How permissions work.

It is also worth knowing which side of the project you are on, because some things are missing for a reason no permission will fix. See Hosts and guests.

Make sure work finds you

Set your notifications early rather than after you have missed something. The default is sensible but it is not yours, and the choice is which events reach your email and which wait for you in the app. Everything that lands in My Items also lands in your inbox unless you say otherwise. See Notification settings.

If you are going to be on site, install the mobile app now while you have signal and a spare five minutes. It is built for the parts of the job that happen away from a desk, and it keeps working with no coverage, syncing when you are back in range. See The mobile app.

Your first week, in order

Sign in and finish your profile. Open the project and find My Items. Open one register and try grouping and filtering it. Set your notifications. Install the mobile app. Then read whichever tool article covers the thing you were actually brought on to do: the Reference sections follow the same groups as the sidebar, so the tool you want is where you would look for it.