Team guide

Whether you're discussing new product features in a small group or sending cat photos to your entire team, Shortwave's real-time, team-oriented features promote focused conversations and collaboration. And it's super easy to get started.

1. Create a workspace

Shortwave workspaces are collections of channels that you can use to communicate and collaborate with teammates. Create a workspace for any team to bring structure and transparency to your ongoing email conversations.

If your team already has a workspace — ask a teammate for an invite! Otherwise, head on over to the workspaces page and click the create workspace button on the bottom of the page.

Plans

You can get started with Shortwave for free — even with your team! To unlock unlimited search and remove collaboration limits, you'll need to upgrade your workspace to a paid plan. Learn more about the free plan limits and pricing on our pricing page. We also have a detailed billing page in our help center as well.

Roles

Upgrading to the Standard Plan gives your workspace roles so you can control who manages details about your workspace.

• Owner: can delete or transfer ownership of a workspace
• Admins: can add workspace & channel members, invite channel guests, and manage billing
• Collaborators: can create, join, and participate in channels
• Guests: can participate in the specific channel they were invited to, but cannot view any of the other channels in the workspace

2. Invite your team

Once you have a workspace, invite your team to give everyone access to your workspace's channels. Just click the members on the workspaces page and then hit that invite button. This will send them an email with a link to join.

3. Join channels

Channels are dedicated places that bring teammates together. You can create channels for topics, projects, teams, or whatever you want! For those who have used Slack and Microsoft Teams channels before, Shortwave channels should feel familiar.

If you're not a member of any channels — create or join some from the workspaces page. Any channel you add to the workspace will also be available for your teammates to join. Here at Shortwave, we use channels like: 📢 Shortwave team, 💾 Engineering, 🎨 Product & Design, 🎲 Random & 🐕 Pets.

It's all just email

Although channels may look like chat, they are still just emails! This means you get some pretty cool benefits 😎

• It's super easy to keep everyone in the loop by moving siloed conversations that happen in people's inboxes to a more collaborative and open environment. No more forgetting to add someone to a thread, just add a channel — plus new members automatically get access to historic messages when they join so they can easily reference past conversations.
• Everything's organized by thread with an (optional) subject, making it easier to keep messages on topic and scroll through past conversations.
• New channel threads get bundled in your inbox, so you can stay in the loop for important conversations without being lost in a flood of unread messages.
• You can add anyone with an email address to a channel thread, even if they aren't using Shortwave, so it's easy to add the right people to the conversation. Note at this time, only Shortwave users can be channel members.
• Every channel comes with a unique email address, so any message sent to that address gives channel members the ability to view and respond. You can also CC or remove a channel from a thread, just like you would with any other contact.

4. Collaborate

Enjoy real-time messaging and contextualized conversation history to help you better connect and collaborate with your team.

Real-time features

In Shortwave, we make email delightful by combining the joy of chat with the power of email. When talking with other Shortwave users, you can transform your email experience to feel more connected and have more fun!

⚡️ Instant delivery and typing indicators bring your email up to speed (literally) with modern chat for seamless, real-time conversations

👍 Emoji reactions give you a quick way to acknowledge a message, conduct informal polls, or just express yourself with other Shortwave users

🌙 Availability statues let you quickly see which teammates are online, offline, or in do-not-disturb mode

Mentions

You can use mentions to help get the attention of others or as a quick way to modify who is on a thread without your hands leaving your keyboard.

@mentions notify teammates with push notifications (respects do-not-disturb)

+mentions add a person or channel to a thread

-mentions remove a person or channel from a thread

#mentions link to a person or channel so you can easily share contact or channel info

Sharing threads

Have an email you want to share with your team? No worries! Shortwave makes it simple no matter the situation:

⏩ Forward a thread into a channel to share a neatly displayed embedded history for easy viewing. No more crazy nested, reverse-chronological mess of messages you typically see in other email clients.

✍️ Add a channel to a thread by adding it to the to: field or using a + mention to loop in all its members so anyone can reply.

🔗 Copy a private link to a thread so you can reference it in a doc or add it to your task manager. The link can only be viewed by people already on the thread, so if you want to share it more widely we recommend forwarding or adding a channel to the thread first.

Final tips

• Use channels with your team as much as possible to increase access to shared knowledge across your workspace
• Personalize notifications for your channels to stay in the loop for relevant conversations without feeling overwhelmed
• Set clear channel names and descriptions so members can understand what each one is for
• Keep discussions organized by starting new threads with relevant subject lines
• Archive old channels to disable new messages — you will still be able to reference any channel threads you participated in via search