Check out the keyboard shortcuts, message formatting, and search operators
Check out /#organization to browse administration options
If anything important seems to be missing, ask support@zulipchat.com about the feature. It might already exist, and we love hearing about what features are missing!
Create initial streams
Most communication in Zulip happens in streams, and the streams you create can help encourage types of conversations you’d like to see happen in your organization. A few notes on how they differ:
Zulip streams are more lightweight than IRC/Slack channels or email lists. It’s totally reasonable to be subscribed to dozens of them.
You can use any character in stream names, including spaces and kanji.
You can set the default streams new organization members are subscribed to when they join.
The most important thing to do when naming your streams it to help instill and support the culture you want to have in your organization. For larger organizations, it can be helpful to have a documented naming scheme. E.g., have all the streams where folks are encouraged to ask for help have names like“help/git”,“help/javascript”, etc., so they’re all sorted together. Slack’s article on channel naming, https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/217626408-Organize-and-name-channels, is reasonable advice on naming strategy for larger organizations.
Add descriptions to your streams, to help make it easy for users to join the streams they need. Example:“Flights, housing, scheduling, etc. for the all-hands meeting.”
These articles have some great ideas for streams you might want to create in your organization:
Zulip integrates directly with dozens of products, including all major version control and issue tracking tools, and indirectly with hundreds more through Zapier and IFTTT. Set up notifications for the products you use! A few recommendations:
For products, just use the product’s logo as the avatar for the bot/integration.
Spend a few minutes finding a cute icon to use as the avatar for your internal tools too!
Invite users and onboard your community
If you’re migrating from an old tool, make sure everyone knows that the team is switching, and about the benefits of Zulip. Link them to the“getting started for users guide”(not written yet).
Ask everyone to introduce themselves. Consider using each person’s name as a topic, so you can have a space for each person, and carry out multiple conversations at once. This can be super useful for any time you have a lot of new people joining around the same time.
Start conversations in each stream to show examples of the types of conversations you want to happen in them.
If the organization is more than a few dozen people, create a“#zulip” stream where users can get help and share tips on how to use Zulip effectively.
Help your users get used to following topics and creating new ones when they start a new conversation. It usually takes a few conversations to get used to topics, but once they do, they’ll never want to go back! Using Zulip’s topic editing features to correct mistakes can help minimize confusion.
Encourage users to communicate in streams over using private messages for most discussions, so that other users have the opportunity to provide advice!
If you’re switching from another tool, make sure that everyone stops using the old tool for at least a week. Stragglers make it hard to give a new collaboration tool an effective trial, because switching between multiple tools is annoying.
<add a link to a future guide on how individual users should get started with Zulip>
Configure your Zulip instance
Familiarize yourself with Zulip’s featureset
Create initial streams
Set up integrations
Invite users and onboard your community
Bonus things to setup