Setting up a new workspace

A brand-new workspace opens on a short setup wizard rather than on an empty inbox. This article covers what it asks, what it decides, and what to do in the hour after you finish it.

The wizard

It runs once per workspace, not once per person: the first member through it clears it for everybody. Anybody in the workspace can complete it — it is deliberately not admin-only, because a workspace whose members all arrive through single sign-on could otherwise contain nobody able to finish setup.

Step one asks how you are arriving. Four answers:

• Start fresh — a native helpdesk with AI. You have no existing helpdesk to bring across.
• Native helpdesk, scattered knowledge — you want the helpdesk here, and your existing documentation lives in several places.
• Move from another helpdesk — you are migrating from Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk or Help Scout.
• AI over an existing helpdesk — you are keeping the helpdesk you have, and layering Auralis AI over it.

Step two follows from the answer. Scattered knowledge asks where your documentation lives (Notion, Confluence or Drive; a Zendesk help centre; Intercom articles; a public URL or sitemap). Moving asks which helpdesk you are moving from. Overlay asks which surface you want — the Chrome extension, or the Zendesk, Jira or Intercom app.

There is no third step. Finishing takes you into the product: start fresh lands on the dashboard, and the other three land on Integrations, which is where the next thing you need is.

Skip is a real option. "I'll explore on my own" records that you skipped and drops you in the inbox.

Two things about it that are one-way

Nothing is saved until you finish. Leaving halfway means starting the wizard again, not resuming it.

Your answer to step one sets the deployment mode, and that is a one-time choice. The wizard will not change it a second time, and an attempt to clear it is refused rather than quietly accepted. It can be changed afterwards, but only as an admin operation in workspace settings — it is not something you redo by re-running setup, because setup does not run again.

That is worth a moment's thought before clicking, since it is the difference between a workspace that runs the full helpdesk and one that runs as an overlay on somebody else's.

What to do next

The wizard is short on purpose. It picks a direction; it does not configure a helpdesk. Here is the order that saves the most rework.

1. Get email arriving. Nothing else matters if work cannot reach you. Under Channels → Email, set up receiving — the forwarding address is the quicker route and needs nothing changed at your mail host. Then configure your sending domain and its DNS records, and do it before you announce a support address to customers: mail sent from an unaligned domain in the first week is exactly the mail that trains a spam filter against you.

2. Invite your team, with the right roles. Settings → Members. Most people are editors; admins configure the workspace. Getting this right early is cheaper than auditing it later.

3. Build teams before you need routing. Settings → Teams, each with an auto-assignment behaviour. A ticket you cannot answer should go to a team, not to a guess at an individual.

4. Set service-level targets. Settings → SLA policies — first-response and resolution times per priority. Do this while the queue is small, because changing priorities later recalculates deadlines from the moment you change them.

5. Set up the tools your agents type with. Canned responses with a /shortcut for the sentences you repeat, and macros for the multi-step actions. Agents adopt these in week one or never.

6. Import, if you are migrating. Connect the source under Integrations, then scan and import from Migrate. Read the migration articles first — imported tickets arrive unassigned, and articles arrive as drafts.

7. Write the first help-centre articles. Even five articles change what the AI can answer and what your team can link to.

Whether to skip

Skipping costs you nothing except the two questions. Everything the wizard sets can be reached from the ordinary settings screens, and the follow-up choices in step two are shortcuts to pages you can open yourself.

The one thing worth answering deliberately rather than skipping past is the first question, because of the deployment-mode decision behind it. If you are not sure whether you are running Auralis as your helpdesk or over somebody else's, that is the conversation to have before you click, not after.