Getting started with Zoabase

Think of Zoabase as the front door, work floor, sales notebook, and support counter of one busy organization—without four sets of keys. A school can plan its science fair and answer parents, a clinic can open a branch and help patients, and Northwind Studio—the example in this guide—can talk through a rough cut, assign the edit, track the client, and answer a support request, all without stitching together separate tools.

What Zoabase brings together

Zoabase is one private workspace for four kinds of work:

• Talking: channels, direct messages, threads, files, and small-group calls.
• Doing: projects, issues, boards, backlogs, sprints, meetings, and collaborative artifacts.
• Selling: leads, organizations, contacts, a stage pipeline, todos, and reminders.
• Supporting: project service desks, a shared ticket inbox, workflows, reports, and a customer help center.

Changes appear live across signed-in users and browser tabs. When Priya updates a shoot issue, Arjun can see it move without refreshing. The green dot near the bottom of the rail means the realtime connection is healthy; a dim dot means Zoabase is reconnecting.

Sign in for the first time

Choose Start free on the homepage to create a workspace. Enter your company name, your name, your email and a password of at least eight characters, then select Create workspace. You become the workspace admin and land on Home. Plans, billing & your workspace covers plans and limits.

Teammates don’t sign up themselves: an admin adds them from the Team page and shares their first password directly. After that they sign in at /login; if their email belongs to more than one workspace, Zoabase asks which one to open.

Heads up: Each workspace is private. People, messages, files and help center customers in one workspace are never visible to another.

Read the rail and sidebar

The dark rail is the map spine. Home stands alone, followed by three compact menus:

Area	Current rail label	Destinations
Communicate	Chat	Messages, Activity, Threads, Saved for later
Customers	Sales	Organizations, Contacts, Sales pipeline, Reminders
Delivery	Work	Projects, Sprints, Meetings, Service desk

Chat-related pages open a second pane for starred conversations, project channels, regular channels, and DMs. Delivery pages use that pane for all projects, all service requests, the customer help center, and an Organization → Project → Service desk tree. Use the header button or ⌘\ on macOS and Ctrl+\ elsewhere to hide or restore the pane. Zoabase remembers that choice in the browser.

The plus button near the top starts a message. Search sits above it. Learn, Team and your profile menu live at the bottom, where the layout stays out of the way but never out of reach.

Learn as you go

Each time you open Zoabase, a Tips & updates card shows one tip you haven't seen yet. Use the arrow buttons, or ← and →, to browse the rest, and untick Show tips at startup if you'd rather not see it. Learn on the rail opens Learning & resources: what's new, every tip by topic with search, guided walkthroughs, and links to each chapter of this guide. Many tips have a Show me how button: it opens the right page and points at each control in turn — use ← → or the buttons, and Esc to stop. You can also reopen the card from your profile menu or the quick switcher (search for “tip”).

Make Home your morning brief

Home opens on My work, a practical call sheet rather than a generic welcome screen. It shows:

• Open issues assigned to you.
• Meetings in the next seven days.
• Work you created and handed to someone else.
• Your projects, with open and assigned issue counts.

Priya might begin here, spot a client review at 11:00, open the overdue color-pass issue, and see that she is still waiting on Arjun for an export. Each issue opens in its drawer, so she can update it without losing the page beneath.

Jump and search

Press ⌘K or Ctrl+K to open the quick switcher. Start typing a channel, person, project, issue, support ticket, document, lead, or page. Use ↑ and ↓ to choose, Enter to open, and Esc to close. Typing a teammate who has no existing DM offers to start one.

Choose Search everything from the switcher, or open Search from the rail, for full results. Message searches understand these operators:

Operator	Example	Finds
from:	from:@priya	Messages from a person
in:	in:#general	Messages in a channel
has:	has:file, has:link, has:image, has:video	Messages with that content
is:	is:pinned, is:thread	Pins or threaded messages

Combine operators with ordinary words: rough cut from:@arjun in:#northwind-film has:video.

Tip: Inside a message or artifact editor, ⌘K/Ctrl+K creates a link. The global switcher opens when an editor has not claimed the shortcut.

The switcher also runs commands: type theme, shortcuts, sidebar or away to switch theme, open the shortcut list, hide the pane or change your presence without leaving the keyboard.

Keyboard shortcuts

Press ? (or ⌘/ / Ctrl+/) anywhere to see every shortcut. The most useful ones:

Action	Keys
Quick switcher	⌘K / Ctrl+K
Search everything	/
New message	C
Go to a page	G, then a letter: H Home, M Messages, A Activity, O Organizations, P Projects, D Service desk…
Previous / next conversation	⌥↑ / ⌥↓ (Alt+↑ / Alt+↓); add Shift for unread ones only
Write in the current conversation	R
Next / previous organization	J / K

Single-key shortcuts never fire while you type in a text box, and the first Tab on any page offers Skip to main content.

To change a shortcut, open Settings → Keyboard shortcuts (your avatar menu → Profile & account). Select a key to record a new one, add up to three per action, or remove them. Zoabase warns you when keys are already taken or kept by the browser, and offers to move them. You can also turn off single-key shortcuts, or all of them, if they get in the way of a screen reader or voice control. Your shortcuts follow you to every workspace you belong to.

Set presence, status, and quiet time

Select your avatar at the foot of the rail. You can mark yourself active or away, edit your profile, or set a short status with an icon and an expiry. Presets include In a meeting, Editing — heads down, Commuting, and Working remotely.

Use Pause notifications for 30 minutes, one hour, two hours, or until tomorrow. Do Not Disturb pauses toast notifications and shows your presence accordingly; it does not hide new activity from the app. Resume notifications from the same menu.

Add teammates

Open Team at the bottom of the rail. Admins can select Add member, then enter a name, email, job title, initial password, and role: Member or Admin. Zoabase displays the new password in a confirmation toast so you can share it securely.

For Northwind Studio, Priya might add Arjun as a Member and Maya as a Member, keeping admin access limited. Teammates can later change their own name, title, avatar color, and password. People with the right permissions can also change another person’s role or deactivate the account — see Roles & permissions.

Tip: Add people before building projects. Project creation can then enroll the right team in one pass, add them to the project channel, and notify them immediately.