Getting started

Download the Administrator guide as a PDF

Your workspace is created for you. By the time this page is useful, it exists, it carries your company’s name, and you are its first administrator. This page covers the first hour after that.

This guide is about setting the workspace up: spheres, people, roles, keys. The day-to-day work — sending invitations, reading cards, dealing with the ones that look wrong — is in the Operator guide, and administrators do all of it too.

Your first sign-in

There are two ways into the Portal, and they work the same way for everyone you invite later.

Sign in with Google. If the address your workspace was created with is a Google account, use it. There is nothing to set up and nothing to remember, and your Google account’s own second factor covers you.

Set a Spherum password. Your invitation carries a link for it. The link is good for seven days and works once; if it has expired, ask us for another.

If you take the password route, you will then be asked to set up a second factor with an authenticator app. For an administrator this is not optional. You will be shown ten recovery codes once, and they are the only way back into your account if you lose the phone. Save them somewhere that is not the phone.

Operators signing in with a password are not required to set up a second factor, but they can, and it is worth asking them to. Once they have, they are challenged exactly as you are.

There is no sign-up form anywhere in Spherum. Nobody reaches your workspace except through an invitation you send.

What’s already set up

• Your company’s name — fixed at the time your workspace was created. Write to us if it needs changing.
• The spheres you purchased
• Your own administrator account

What isn’t

• What your spheres ask people for. Each one arrives carrying a default set of fields and nothing more — Spheres lists them.
• Anyone else on your team
• Any of the people you want to reach

Those three are yours. The order below is the one that saves the most work.

What to do first

Add a second administrator. A workspace always keeps at least one, and Spherum will refuse to archive the last one — but a single administrator is still one lost phone away from a workspace nobody can get into.

Decide what your spheres ask for. Every sphere arrives with a default set of fields in it. Add what you need, remove what you don’t, and do it before anyone fills anything in.

Add your operators. An operator works only in the spheres you assign them; an administrator sees everything. Deciding that split now means you set it up once.

Invite one person, and watch what happens. Invite yourself if you like. Seeing the flow from the other side once is worth more than reading about it. Invitations covers the sending.

What inviting someone does not do

Adding a person to your workspace creates an invitation, not a record you can read. Until that person fills in their own details and grants your company access, there is nothing there — and after they grant it, you see that they have granted it and how many contacts they hold, never the contacts themselves.

This is the part most people have to see once before they believe it. It is also the reason the product works: the people you invite are being asked to share something with you, not to hand it over.