# Setting up a workspace, end to end

Four things turn an empty workspace into a working one, and the order matters. Tell Connect who the business is, connect at least one channel, give it something to be right from, then decide what it may do without asking. Skip the third and it answers from general knowledge; skip the fourth and it either does nothing or does more than you meant.

- **Status:** Available
- **Audience:** both
- **Last verified:** 2026-09-10
- **Canonical:** https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/workflows/workspace-setup/

## The flow, stage by stage

1. Trigger — somebody with workspace administration opens a workspace that has nothing in it.
2. User or external event — none. Setup is the one flow that starts from a person rather than from a customer.
3. Authentication and workspace resolution — every step below happens inside one workspace, resolved from the session, so nothing configured here can land in anyone else's.
4. Ingest — the first real ingest is a mailbox sync or an inbound call, and it happens only after a channel is connected and healthy.
5. Canonical record — a business profile, one or more mailboxes with roles and signatures, and, once mail arrives, threads and contacts in the canonical shape every screen reads.
6. Reasoning — Connect can classify and draft as soon as a channel is live, but what it says is only as good as the knowledge behind it.
7. Knowledge, memory and rules — knowledge sources are added and approved, facts are corrected, and standing instructions record the things a person would otherwise repeat.
8. Autonomy and approval — the runtime mode plus any narrower rule per channel, mailbox or contact. Most workspaces start in Review before send and loosen once the drafts read right.
9. Action through a provider — the first send. It goes through the same boundary a person's own send uses.
10. Result — a provider acknowledgement, recorded as evidence rather than assumed.
11. Relationship, timeline and memory — the first contacts become people, and their history starts accumulating in one place across channels.
12. Audit, usage and Needs You — every decision lands in the log, the first allowance is spent, and anything held appears in the queue.

## Do these four in this order

1. Fill in the business profile: what the business does, who it serves, how it wants to sound, and the boundaries it will not cross.
   - Result: Every draft from this point has a voice and a subject. Doing this after connecting mail means the first replies are written by something that does not know what you sell.
2. Connect a channel. Mail is the usual first one: Gmail through Google, Microsoft Graph, or any IMAP and SMTP server. Give each mailbox a role and a signature.
   - Result: Mail begins arriving in the canonical records. Watch the health verdicts rather than the word *connected* — a mailbox that authenticates and returns nothing is a quiet mailbox, which is a signal in itself.
3. Add knowledge: the documents, pages and answers a reply must be grounded in. A customer workspace edits, reindexes, checks and removes its sources on its own screen; adding a new source is arranged with JBRH.
   - Result: Answers start citing something the business actually published, and the gap between what Connect knows and what it guesses becomes visible.
4. Set what Connect may do unsupervised — the mode for the workspace, then any narrower rule for a channel, a mailbox or a single contact.
   - Result: Work either flows or queues in Needs You, on purpose rather than by accident.

> **Note** Phone setup is its own sequence, because a number, a carrier and a voice have to line up before the first call. It is written separately as [Setting up the phone for the first time](/docs/workflows/first-phone-setup/).

## What good looks like at the end of the first day

- At least one mailbox with a role, a signature and a health verdict that is not merely *connected*.
- A business profile somebody outside the business could read and recognise.
- Enough knowledge that a typical enquiry can be answered from it rather than from general reasoning.
- A runtime mode that is a decision, not a default — most often Review before send while the drafts are still being judged.
- One deliberate test: a real enquiry, read, drafted, and approved by a person who then says whether the reply was right.

The last one is the only measurement that matters early on. A workspace that has been configured but never watched answer a real message is not set up; it is furnished.

## Where setups go wrong

**Autonomy set to Auto on day one** — Connect sends before anyone has judged its drafts. Review before send costs a few minutes a day and buys the evidence to loosen safely.
**Knowledge added last** — Every reply written before it is a reply written without it, and those replies are already in customers' inboxes.
**A second mailbox for one real inbox** — Reconnecting an account that already exists can create a duplicate. Check the Mailboxes screen for what is already there before adding — [Repairing a mailbox](/docs/workflows/mailbox-repair/) covers the case where a row exists but does not show.
**Nobody assigned to the queue** — Held work needs a person. A queue nobody reads is the same as an agent that never replies, with more machinery.

## Questions

### How long does setting up a workspace take?

The configuration is minutes: a profile, a mailbox, a mode. Getting the answers right takes as long as it takes to feed in what the business knows and to read the first drafts critically. Treat the first week as the setup, not the first hour.

### Can I connect more than one mailbox?

Yes. A workspace can hold several, each with its own role, signature, autonomy and health. How many at once is a ceiling on your plan rather than a limit on the product — see [Usage and allowances](/docs/account/usage/).

### Do I have to finish setup before Connect does anything?

No, and that is the risk. A connected mailbox in Auto starts replying whether or not knowledge has been added. Either finish the knowledge step first or hold the workspace in Review before send until you have read some drafts.

## Related

- [Your first hour](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/getting-started/first-hour/)
- [Your first week](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/getting-started/first-week/)
- [Signing in for the first time, end to end](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/workflows/first-sign-in/)
- [Connecting a phone line, end to end](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/workflows/first-phone-setup/)
- [Knowledge in Connect](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/knowledge/)
- [The four autonomy modes](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/autonomy/modes/)

## What this page is based on

- docs-source/sources/CHANNELS.md section 1 — mailboxes, roles, health and the two mail models
- docs-source/sources/GENERAL.md sections 1-3 — workspaces, the record model and the request path
- `backend/app/metering.py` — mailbox ceilings and knowledge-source provisioning
- Connect capability registry (docs-source/facts.py)