Your first week in Deskly

Create your office and you land on the common floor with six rooms already drawn: open desks, two meeting rooms, a focus room, a lounge and a hallway. You do not have to design anything to start.

• Walk around with the arrow keys, or click where you want to stand.
• Step into a meeting room. That is the call - there is nothing to start.
• Open the whiteboard in that room and leave a note on it.
• Rename the rooms to match how your team actually talks about them, in Rooms.

The open floor carries no audio at all. That is deliberate: a busy office should not be a wall of noise. Audio belongs to rooms.

Nobody walks into your office uninvited. People exist because an admin added them, which is why there is no public join link.

• Add your team in People. Each person gets a temporary password you hand over.
• Ask everyone to change it in Settings on first sign-in.
• If you run cohorts or classes, use an enrolment link instead - it creates the account and puts the student on the right floor.

Deskly cannot send email yet, so passwords and links are passed on by you. Keep them out of a public channel.

The one habit that makes or breaks a virtual office is that presence is honest. Deskly does most of it for you: Away comes from screen lock and real idle, decided by the server rather than by a browser that kept saying you were there.

• Set your status to Focus when you do not want to be walked in on.
• Agree as a team that being on the floor means available, and a focus room means not.
• Let the hallway do its job - bumping into somebody is the point.

If your team runs on Jira or Azure DevOps, connect it in Integrations. Credentials are encrypted before they are stored, and nobody edits a file on a server.

• Paste your organisation URL and a personal access token, then tick the projects to track.
• Match each person to their tracker account under "Who is who" - Deskly never guesses this.
• Point each floor at the project its work belongs to, so the marketing board stops filing into engineering's backlog.
• Open Task boards to see everyone's work in three columns, drawn from the tracker rather than from a copy.

Say what you are working on with one tap from the floor. The hours are the overlap between that and the time the presence ledger says you were actually active, so they can never exceed the time you were here.

• Open Time on tasks at the end of the week and read it together.
• The "Not attributed" row is the honest gap - hours somebody was here for and never put against anything.
• On Jira, the same page shows what the tracker was told beside what the office saw, with a button to close the difference.

Nothing is ever written to your tracker without somebody pressing a button. That is a rule, not a setting.

Once the habit is there, the rest is configuration you can do as you need it.

• Split into floors when one floor gets crowded - each team gets its own rooms, chat, boards and presence.
• Give roles your own names in Roles, and let leads administer their own floor.
• Turn on recording for the meetings that need a record, and share guest passes with clients.
• Run classes and courses if you teach, and issue certificates with a public verification page.