Getting Started with Openbook: From Zero to Working Space in an Hour

You can get a real, working team workspace running in Openbook in about an hour. Not a demo. Not an empty shell you promise to fill in later. A space with the right rooms, seeded content, your team invited, and a plan for the first week.

This guide walks through that hour step by step. It assumes nothing: no prior Openbook experience, no migration plan, no IT ticket. By the end you will have an organization, a space built from a template, a handful of rooms your team will actually use, and a first-week routine that gets people posting instead of lurking.

Here is the hour, roughly:

Time	Step
0–5 min	Create your organization
5–15 min	Create a space from a template
15–30 min	Adjust the rooms to fit your team
30–40 min	Set roles and visibility
40–50 min	Seed content before anyone arrives
50–60 min	Invite the team and post the welcome

Let's go.

First, understand the three layers

Openbook has a simple hierarchy, and everything else makes sense once you have it: Organization → Space → Room.

• Organization is your company. It is the tenant that holds everything: your people, your spaces, your billing. Most companies need exactly one.
• Space is a workspace for a team, department, project, or community. A space has its own members, its own roles, its own settings, and a customizable sidebar. Your marketing team gets a space. Your product team gets a space. A big cross-functional launch can get its own space too.
• Room is where work actually happens. There are 18 room types — a feed, a kanban board, a docs editor, a wiki, a whiteboard, a chat, a retrospective board, and more — and each one is a fully-built app, not a widget. You compose a space out of the rooms your team needs and skip the ones it doesn't.

The mental model that helps most people: a space is a building, and rooms are the rooms in it. A software team's building might have a sprint board, a standup room, and a Q&A room. An HR team's building might have a feed, an events hub, and a time-off room. Same platform, different composition.

This is the core idea behind Openbook: instead of buying five separate tools and duct-taping them together, you assemble one workspace from building blocks. If you want the fuller picture of what each block does, the product overview covers all 18 room types, and we go deep on each one in Rooms Explained.

Step 1: Create your organization (minutes 0–5)

Sign up at openbook.work and create your organization. This is the five-minute part: name it after your company, and you are the Owner.

Two decisions worth making now rather than later:

Who else should be an Admin? Openbook has four roles — Owner, Admin, Member, and Viewer. You do not want to be the only person who can fix settings, approve things, and invite people. Pick one or two trusted colleagues to make Admins once they join. More on roles in Step 4.

One space or several? If you are setting Openbook up for a single team of 5–20 people, start with one space. If you are setting it up as a company-wide workspace, still start with one space — a company-wide one — and let departments spin up their own spaces in week two or three, once people have seen how the first one works. Rolling out one good space beats rolling out six empty ones. Every time.

Step 2: Create a space from a template (minutes 5–15)

You can build a space from scratch, room by room. Don't — at least not for your first one. Openbook ships with 12 one-click space templates that provision a sensible set of rooms and seed them with starter content, so your team's first impression is a working space rather than a blank page.

The twelve templates:

Template	Built for
Software	Engineering teams running sprints
Product	Product managers and discovery work
Marketing	Campaigns, content, and calendars
Sales	Pipeline and account work
Design	Design teams and creative review
HR	People teams, culture, and time off
Ops	Operational cadences and process
Finance	Budgeting, reporting, close cycles
Agency	Client delivery and creative review
Startup HQ	A whole small company in one space
Single Project	One project, start to finish
Support	Support teams and knowledge

Pick the one closest to your team's actual work. Closest is good enough — templates are starting points, not contracts. Every room a template creates can be renamed, rearranged, or deleted, and you can add rooms the template didn't include. We compare all twelve in detail in Space Templates: One-Click Workspaces for Every Team.

If your team genuinely doesn't map to any template — say you are a research group or a volunteer organization — start blank and add three rooms: a Feed for communication, a Table Board or Kanban Board for tracking work, and a Docs room for writing things down. That trio covers the basics for almost any group; you can grow from there.

Name the space something people will recognize instantly. "Marketing" beats "MKT-Global-Workspace-2025." You will thank yourself when the sidebar fills up.

Step 3: Adjust the rooms to fit (minutes 15–30)

Open your new space and look at what the template gave you. Now edit ruthlessly. The goal for launch day is a small set of rooms with obvious purposes, not a directory of everything Openbook can do.

A good launch set for most teams is four to six rooms:

1. A feed — the social home of the space. This is where announcements, wins, polls, and everyday updates live. Posts support images, files, five types of polls, events, kudos, emoji reactions, and threaded comments with @mentions, so almost any "hey team" message has a natural home here. Details on the Feed page.
2. A work-tracking room — a Kanban Board if your work moves through stages (engineering, design, content production), or a Table Board if it is more like structured records (pipeline, inventory, requests). Both come with large template libraries — 36 board templates for kanban, around 40 for table boards — so you rarely start from an empty grid.
3. A place to write — Docs gives you a Notion-style block editor with a slash menu and an infinitely nested page tree. If your team prefers Markdown and a more structured knowledge base, the Wiki room offers side-by-side live preview of GitHub-flavored Markdown. Pick one for now; you can add the other later. Unsure which suits your team? Wiki or Docs? walks through the tradeoffs.
4. A chat — the Chat room gives you Slack-style channels, DMs, presence, and typing indicators. There is also a floating chat widget on every page of Openbook, so people can talk without leaving whatever they are looking at.
5. Optionally, a check-in room — if your team runs standups or wants a weekly pulse, add a Check-in room now so the ritual exists from day one. It handles scheduled async standups, mood tracking, and status flags like Blocked and Kudos.

Delete or hold back anything else the template created that you will not use in the first two weeks. You can re-add any room type in seconds later. An unused room in the sidebar is clutter; a room added the week the team needs it feels like the tool growing with you.

Two small things that pay off here:

• Order the sidebar deliberately. The space sidebar is customizable. Put the feed first, then the work board, then everything else. The top of the sidebar is the default landing behavior for wandering attention.
• Name rooms by function, not by type. "Sprint Board" is better than "Kanban." "Team Handbook" is better than "Docs." People should know what a room is for before they click it.

Step 4: Set roles and visibility (minutes 30–40)

Openbook's permission model is deliberately simple: four roles, plus per-room visibility. Full details live on the roles and permissions page, but here is what matters for setup day.

Role	What it is for
Owner	You. Ultimate control of the organization.
Admin	Trusted people who manage settings, members, and structure.
Member	Everyone doing the work. Can post, edit, and participate.
Viewer	People who should see but not touch — stakeholders, observers.

For a first rollout: make one or two colleagues Admins, make everyone else Members, and reserve Viewer for genuine read-only cases like an executive sponsor who wants visibility without edit rights, or later, a client.

Per-room visibility is the other half of the model. Any room can be visible to everyone in the space or restricted to certain people. Use this sparingly at launch — a transparent space builds trust faster — but it is the right tool for the genuinely sensitive rooms: a hiring pipeline on a table board, a leadership planning doc, compensation discussions. Set those to restricted before you invite anyone, not after someone stumbles into them.

A default worth stating out loud to your team: everything is open unless there is a specific reason it is not. Teams that default to open get more out of a shared workspace, because people can answer their own questions by looking.

Step 5: Seed content before anyone arrives (minutes 40–50)

This is the step people skip, and it is the one that most determines whether your rollout sticks. Nobody wants to be the first person to post in an empty feed. So don't let the feed be empty.

Before you send a single invite, spend ten minutes planting content:

• Write a welcome post in the feed. Explain what this space is for, what lives in which room, and what you want people to do first. Pin it — pinned posts stay visible at the top of the feed.
• Post a poll. The feed supports five poll types. Ask something easy and slightly fun — where should the next team lunch be, which project name do people prefer. A poll gives every new arrival a one-click way to participate, which breaks the lurker seal.
• Put real work on the board. Add the projects or tasks your team is actually doing this week to the kanban or table board. Assign owners. A board with real cards reads as "this is where work lives now." An empty board reads as "optional experiment."
• Start one doc. A team handbook stub, a "how we work" page, or notes from your last meeting. One real page in the docs room signals that writing things down happens here.
• Post an announcement about the first ritual. If you added a check-in room, announce when the first check-in goes out and what the questions will be.

The bulletin board sidebar on the feed surfaces announcements, birthdays, trending posts, and resources automatically, so as content accumulates, the space starts to feel alive without extra effort from you.

Step 6: Invite the team (minutes 50–60)

Now send the invites. Everyone you invite lands in the people directory, where teammates can find each other, follow coworkers to keep up with their activity, and see the org chart as your organization fills out.

Pair the invite with a short message — in whatever channel your team currently uses — that covers three things:

1. What Openbook is replacing or consolidating. Be concrete: "This replaces the project tracker spreadsheet and the status-update email. Chat moves here at the end of the month."
2. The one thing to do today. Give a single, specific first action: "Vote in the poll and comment on the welcome post." Small, guaranteed-success first actions beat "explore the workspace."
3. Where to ask questions. Point at the feed or chat, and commit to answering fast for the first week.

One more thing to set up for yourself before the crowd arrives: press ⌘K. That is Openbook's global search and command palette, and it works everywhere — find a doc, jump to a room, get anywhere in a couple of keystrokes. Teach it to your team early; it collapses the "where is that thing" cost that makes people give up on new tools.

If you are on the Pro plan or trialing it, this is also the moment to connect the AI assistant. It is a global assistant that takes real actions — creating tasks, posting updates, inviting members, around 25 tools in all — and it asks for confirmation before doing anything destructive. It works bring-your-own-key with Anthropic, OpenAI, or DeepSeek, so you plug in an API key from your preferred provider and it is live for the whole workspace. We wrote a full guide: Meet the AI Assistant That Actually Does the Work.

Your first week, day by day

The hour of setup gets you a workspace. The first week decides whether it becomes the workspace. Here is a day-by-day plan that works for most teams.

Day 1 — Arrival day. Everyone joins, votes in the poll, comments on the welcome post. You (and your Admins) react to and reply to everything. Speed of response on day one sets the tone: this place is alive.

Day 2 — First check-in. The first scheduled check-in goes out from the Check-in room. Keep it to three questions — what did you do, what is next, anything blocking you — plus the built-in mood indicator (green, yellow, red). People answer async, on their own schedule. If someone flags Blocked, respond visibly the same day; the fastest way to teach a team that flags work is to act on the first one. For the case that async check-ins can replace your standup meeting entirely, see Team Check-ins: Replacing Status Meetings with Async Pulses.

Day 3 — Work on the board. Run your normal planning or triage conversation, but do it against the board. Move cards, assign owners, set statuses in front of everyone. The habit you are building: if it is not on the board, it is not tracked.

Day 4 — First real announcement. Post something that previously would have been an email — a policy note, a launch update, a customer win. Use the feed's announcement format so it lands in the bulletin sidebar. Watch the comments do the thing email never did.

Day 5 — Kudos and close the week. Post kudos to two or three people for specific things they did this week. Recognition posts are the highest-engagement content on any team feed, and ending week one with public thanks makes people want a week two.

Through the week, keep one rule for yourself: answer everything fast. For seven days, every question, comment, and check-in gets a same-day response from you or an Admin. Momentum in a new workspace is fragile exactly once — at the start.

What to move in, and in what order

Do not migrate everything at once. Sequenced adoption beats big-bang adoption because each move is small enough that nobody has to relearn their whole job in a day. A sequence that works:

1. Week 1: Communication. Announcements, updates, and team talk move to the feed and chat. This is the easiest habit to shift and the most visible.
2. Week 2: Work tracking. The spreadsheet or old tracker gets frozen; the board becomes the source of truth. Import or re-enter active items only — do not archaeologically migrate two years of closed tasks.
3. Week 3: Knowledge. Move the ten documents people actually open — onboarding notes, how-to guides, the handbook — into Docs or the Wiki. Leave the rest where it is until someone needs it.
4. Week 4: Rituals. Retros move to the Retrospective room, which gives you 12 formats, real-time voting and grouping, and CSV export of action items. Status meetings shrink or die as the Project Status room and check-ins absorb them.

By the end of a month, the consolidation story is real: one workspace where there used to be a chat tool, a tracker, a docs tool, and a meeting that should have been a post.

Common setup mistakes (so you can skip them)

• Too many rooms on day one. Six focused rooms beat sixteen aspirational ones. Add rooms when the need appears.
• Too many spaces on day one. One thriving space recruits the next five teams for you. Six empty spaces recruit nobody.
• Inviting before seeding. An empty workspace makes a bad first impression you only get to make once. Ten minutes of seeding fixes it.
• Keeping the old tools fully alive. If the spreadsheet still works, the spreadsheet still wins. Freeze the old thing when the new thing takes over — announce the date and stick to it.
• Locking down by default. Restricted rooms have their place, but a workspace where most things are hidden teaches people there is nothing here for them.
• Going silent after launch. The workspace needs a heartbeat for its first month, and that heartbeat is you. Post, reply, react, and run the rituals until they run themselves.

Next steps

You now have an organization, a composed space, seeded rooms, an invited team, and a week-one plan. From here:

• Read Rooms Explained to see all 18 room types and when each one earns a place in your space.
• Browse the space templates if other teams in your company are ready for spaces of their own.
• Set up the AI assistant with your provider key so routine task creation and updates stop being manual work.
• Check pricing when you outgrow the free plan — Free covers unlimited rooms and members with all 18 room types, Pro adds unlimited history, dashboards, the AI assistant, and proofing at $15 per user per month ($12 annual), and Business adds SSO/SAML, audit logs, and API access at $15 ($12 annual). Pro comes with a 14-day free Pro trial, so you can run your whole first month on it.

One hour to set up. One week to build the habit. One month to consolidate. Start the clock.