Ultimate guide for your first week in Switchboard
Reap the benefits of Switchboard by quickly learning the basics.
Table of Contents
Welcome to Switchboard!
In this short guide we’ll show you how to use Switchboard by yourself and then introduce it to your team so you can ultimately keep everyone on the same page.
🔑 Why Switchboard? It’s an interactive, expansive space for your team, tools, and communication.
Switchboard is more engaging than sit-and-stare video calls, more dynamic than whiteboards, and more actionable than emails and videos.
By combining the best of screen recording, whiteboarding, and video conferencing in one tool, you can see and share what matters in context, making it easier to keep your focus and get work done instead of just shuffling it between tabs and apps. To keep everybody on the same page, set up a Switchboard room.
🏕 Step 1: Set up your room
Each Switchboard room has an interactive, expandable canvas where you can add content and share ideas. You can visualize and organize all of the browser-based apps, documents, and files you and your team need—side by side. Rooms keep your work open and are always ready for feedback, comments, and conversations—whether live on a video call or async.
Create your first room fast with one of our ready-to-use templates.
We recommend creating your first room based on a current project your team is working on. You can set it up by yourself first, then share it with your team. To make your project room—or any new room—head over to the upper left corner of your workspace and click on that gray + button.
📚Top resources for setting up your room:
🔨 Step 2: Add your work to the room
It’s really easy to add browser-based apps, websites, images, PDFs, and more to Switchboard—just use the toolbar at the bottom of the canvas, paste them directly, or drag and drop.
The real magic is that any and all the web apps and tools you use with your team—from Google Docs to Jira, Linear, Asana, Amplitude, and more all work in Switchboard and become multiplayer when they’re on the canvas. Just paste the link directly on the canvas or add a browser.
Switchboard also has a few built-in apps, like stickies, text, shapes, vote, timer, and open questions. You can add them to the canvas at any time and move them around, change their colors. You can organize related content into sections so it stays together and is clear what it’s for.
Since you’re starting with a project room, add materials that are relevant to the project. For example, grab the project brief, your task manager, PDFs, and anything else you regularly work on. Once they’re all in the room you can stop chasing down links and files! Everything you add stays right where you put it, and it’s all accessible from one URL.
Now that all your project materials are in the room, you can see everything you’re working on in one space. As an added bonus, Switchboard AI can interact with content in the room to summarize, analyze, and suggest directly based on your own work.
📚Top resources for adding content to your room:
- What websites and apps work in Switchboard?
- How do I add files to the room?
- How does Switchboard AI work?
🎥 Step 3: Record instructions
Before you share the room, you can add an overview or instructions with interactive recordings to show what’s important and explain why it matters. The coolest part is that viewers can pause anytime to access the content in the room. So if you’re telling them to add sticky notes with ideas to a section, they will land right on that section to get to work.
As you’re recording, you can zoom in and out of multiple pieces of content without toggling tabs, browsers, images, or videos. And since the recording is always in the room, your team doesn’t need to hunt for a special link to watch it.
🤝 Step 4: Share with your collaborators
When you work together in Switchboard, everyone has access to the same information at any time with just one url. No more lost time finding a link or waiting on someone to send it to you. That also means anyone can also go to a room to update it, catch up on progress, or share what they’re working on whenever they need to.
To share your room, all you have to do is invite someone by adding their email. Most customers invite their core internal team to the workspace so they have access to all public rooms. They also invite agencies, contractors, and other third parties to individual rooms so they have access to current work, without seeing the rest of the workspace.
How you can share rooms and content in Switchboard:
- Invite your internal team to the workspace so they can access shared, public rooms and create their own.
- Invite contractors, agencies, and external partners to specific rooms so they can work with you on the project (without accessing your other work).
- Share a call link to give one time access to someone so they can participate in a meeting.
- @mention someone in a comment, so they can review feedback or answer a question in context.
📚Top resources for sharing rooms with others:
- Who should I invite to Switchboard?
- What types of Users are there in Switchboard?
- How do I invite people to Switchboard?
👯 Step 5: Work together—during and between meetings
The beauty of doing more work in Switchboard is that you have one space for working and meeting. Here’s how you can keep work moving in-between meetings, and make the most of the ones that stay on the calendar.
- Share ideas and work: As your project moves forward, keep the contents in your room updated, share new docs and files, and record any interactive videos to keep everyone in the loop, or to prompt teammates to take action.
- Ask and answer questions, give and receive feedback with comments: @mention a teammate in a comment to ask a question (or answer one). Or leave a comment directly on something in a room so your feedback stays in-context in one space. You’ll get a notification when they respond and you can continue the conversation.
- Make decisions live or async: Resolve open questions through comment threads, or use the open questions and vote apps to gauge opinions and get final decisions without scheduling a meeting.
- Host interactive working sessions. For the meetings that do stay on the calendar, you are only ever one click away from accessing everything you need for it. Less prep time, no awkward screenshares, and best of all you can work together on anything in the room live.
📚Top resources for working with others in Switchboard:
⚡Step 6: Stay in touch with Switchboard
If you have burning questions, you can reach out to our support team anytime. Or check out our help docs to deep dive on features and functionality. Stay up to date on our latest launches and Switchboard news on the blog. Get more inspo and create rooms fast by browsing our frequently updated template gallery. Happy first week in Switchboard!
