Shortwave for teams

Whether you're discussing new product features in a small group or sending design sketches to your entire team, Shortwave's real-time, team-oriented features promote focused conversations and collaboration.

Create a team

Shortwave's teams allow for centralized billing and creation of channels that you can use to collaborate with teammates. Create a team to give your entire organization access to paid Shortwave features and the ability to collaborate in real-time over email.

You can create a team from the Members & Billing tab in Settings. Just click the "Create team" button on the bottom of the page, or choose "Create Team" from the team selection dropdown if you already have a team.

Plans

You can get started with Shortwave for free — even with your team! To unlock unlimited search and advanced AI features, you'll need to upgrade your team to a paid plan. Learn more about the free plan limits and pricing on our pricing page. We also have a detailed billing page in our help center as well.

Roles

You can give team members defined roles so you can control who has access to what:

• Owner: can delete or transfer ownership of a team
• Admins: can add team & channel members, invite channel guests, and manage billing
• Collaborators: can create, join, and participate in channels

Invite your team

Once you have a team, invite your peers to give everyone access to paid features and to your team's channels. Just click Invite member on the Members & Billing page in settings. This will send them an email with a link to join.

Join channels

Channels are dedicated places that bring teammates together. You can create channels for topics, projects, teams, or whatever you want! For those who have used Slack and Microsoft Teams channels before, Shortwave channels should feel familiar.

If you're not a member of any channels — create or join some from the Members & Billing settings page. Any channel you add to the team will also be available for your teammates to join. Here at Shortwave, we use channels like: 📢 Shortwave team, 💾 Engineering, 🎨 Product & Design, & 🎲 Random.

It's all just email

Although channels may look like chat, they're still just emails, giving you powerful benefits of both chat and email.

• It's super easy to keep everyone in the loop by moving siloed conversations that happen in people's inboxes to a more collaborative and open environment. No more forgetting to add someone to a thread, just add a channel — plus new members automatically get access to historic messages when they join so they can easily reference past conversations.
• Everything's organized by thread making it easier to keep messages on topic and scroll through past conversations.
• New channel threads get bundled in your inbox, so you can stay in the loop for important conversations without being lost in a flood of unread messages.
• You can add anyone with an email address to a channel thread, even if they aren't using Shortwave, so it's easy to add the right people to the conversation. Note at this time, only Shortwave users can be channel members.
• Every channel comes with a unique email address, so any message sent to that address gives channel members the ability to view and respond. You can also CC or remove a channel from a thread, just like you would with any other contact.

Collaborate

Enjoy real-time messaging and contextualized conversation history to help you better connect and collaborate with your team.

Real-time features

Email has entered the chat. When talking with other Shortwave users, you can transform your email experience to feel more connected, faster and smarter.

⚡️ Instant delivery and typing indicators bring your email up to speed (literally) with modern chat for seamless, real-time conversations

👍 Emoji reactions give you a quick way to acknowledge a message, react to new features or conduct informal polls

🌙 Availability statues let you quickly see which teammates are online, offline, or in do-not-disturb mode

Mentions

You can use mentions to help get the attention of others or as a quick way to modify who is on a thread without your hands leaving your keyboard.

@mentions notify teammates with push notifications (this respects do-not-disturb)

+mentions add a person or channel to a thread

-mentions remove a person or channel from a thread

#mentions link to a person or channel so you can easily share contact or channel info

Sharing threads

Sharing threads in Shortwave is seamless.

⏩ Forward a thread into a channel to share a neatly displayed embedded history for easy viewing. No more crazy nested, reverse-chronological mess of messages you typically see in other email clients.

✍️ Add a channel to a thread by adding it to the to: field or using a + mention to loop in all its members so anyone can reply.

🔗 Copy a private link to a thread so you can reference it in a doc or add it to your task manager. The link can only be viewed by people already on the thread, so if you want to share it more widely we recommend forwarding or adding a channel to the thread first.

Final tips

• Personalize notifications for your channels to stay in the loop for relevant conversations without feeling overwhelmed
• Set clear channel names so members can understand what each one is for
• Keep discussions organized by starting new threads with relevant subject lines
• Archive old channels to disable new messages — you will still be able to reference any channel threads you participated in via search