Welcome!  You’ve landed in the right spot to get Hive set up the way you want to work.

Hive takes everything your team needs – quick chat, tasks, projects, and files – and puts them on one dashboard.  Together, with the power of flexible views so you can work the way you want, and predictive analytics about upcoming issues, Hive is working just as hard as you are to keep your projects on track.

This article will take you through the most important milestones in getting set up, but if you’re short on time – check out this 1 minute breakdown of Hive:

Ready to go?  Create your Hive account, and get started with the steps below.

1. Enter your first tasks

Tasks are the building blocks of Hive and exist within a project. You can either create a task inside a project, or create a task outside of an existing project! Start by entering a few tasks on your own My Actions list, by using the blue +New button in the top right, and enter at least 3 tasks for upcoming work you have to complete. Select a due date and check them out on the My Actions tab along the left navigation bar.

When you created those actions, did you notice all the possible details you can add to the action card? We recommend to start simple, but when you’re ready – there are some powerful ways to manage tasks:

Don’t forget – that blue +New button, then select ‘Action’ is the place to assign actions to your team as well.

2. Collaborate with your team

Now it’s time to think about who will need access to Hive so that they can be be assigned work, comment and collaborate, attach files, review progress, move projects forward to the next stage, and close them out.

Add your co-workers.  For primary members of the workspace who have access to multiple projects – invite them in using email, and selecting which projects they should see – simply using the +Invite button next to +New action button:

Organize everyone.  If your co-workers are organized into departments or teams, you’ll want to add that team structure to Hive so you can more easily add them to projects, and specifically @mention a team in chat groups and comments.  You can find the Teams section from your profile menu (your avatar in the top right), then selecting Your workspace > Manager Users.

Include any external users.  Collaborate with freelancers or work closely with clients or vendors?  Add them as an external user.   They will have access to a single project, and its associated chat group, if one exists.  Click to that External Users tab as shown in the above screenshot, to add an External User to one project. You can also add a group of External Users as a Team!

3. Start collaborating

Now that you have a few tasks on your own to-do list (My Actions), and invited your colleagues and organized them into teams, let’s start entering projects.

Ready to go?
Head to Project Navigator, click +New Project button, and enter a name.  You’ll see options underneath for some optional fields:

• Due date –  flag to the team when the project is expected to be completed or launch

• Labels – categorize your work

• Description – an optional free text area that includes key scope or description that you would like all members to reference

• Attachments – stored in the project details area.

• Parent project – you can make this project a child or sub to a parent project.  We recommend making Parent projects if you have many client projects under the same client, or you have departments, and sub-projects underneath each department in your organization.

• Phases –  If your work is ordered into different lifecycles, we recommend adding them as phases.

On the next screens you’ll pick the layout, and decide on the sharing permissions. Who do you want to give project access to? This is totally customizable and can be set by individual project.

With the project created, start collaborating with your team:

• Do you have repeatable steps in your workflow?  Set up action templates.

• Post a comment on an action card to keep conversation in context of the task at hand

• @mention your teammates to call their attention quickly to your question or comment

• Check your Notifications feed – (look for the bell icon in the top right) – it’s your command central for tasks and items that need your attention.  You can always choose when and how you get notified, too.

Need inspiration? What type of work does your team do, and what’s your primary goal for using Hive?  We power many teams – and have several examples of a marketing, product development, software development, human resources, content marketing, and branding/client project setups.  If you haven’t already added those project templates during the on-boarding screens, send us a message and let us know what template you’re looking for, and our Customer Success team will be in touch.

Final Steps & Power-Ups:

You’ve got the basics of Hive down, and now it’s time to customize your workspace a bit more. Here are a few things you should start with:

• Get the apps.  Make sure to download the Hive apps so you can create tasks, respond to comments, and chat to your colleagues on the go, and our desktop apps for Mac or PC.

• Setup your integrations.  Check out our available integrations through Zapier.

• Join a webinar.  Sign up for our next webinar – Maximizing Productivity with Hive

• Ask us anything.  Use the blue question mark in the top right of the app to reach us, or visit our Help Center for more detailed articles.

• Personalize it! Finally, don’t forget to add your company logo to Hive