Setting up an organization: an admin checklist

Most organization settings can be changed at any time, but some changes are cheap before you have content and tedious after it. This checklist puts the steps in the order that avoids rework. You need to be an org admin, which the person who created the organization already is; everything below lives under Organization settings, reached from the gear icon at the top of the left sidebar.

Keep the sample content while you work through the list; it gives you items to test rules and permissions on. Delete Welcome to Trace.Space, Sample project and Playground from the Items tree when you no longer need them. The example item types and dropdowns they use stay under Item types, where you can edit or delete them.

Go to Item types and create one type per kind of thing you will write: requirement, test case, stakeholder need, and so on. For each type set the Identifier, the prefix of every short ID, and add its attributes, marking one Text attribute as the item heading and choosing which attributes show in the document view.

Do this first because the identifier becomes part of every item's ID, and because every item of a type carries the type's attributes, so the structure is easiest to get right before items exist. See Item types.

Still on the Item types page, create the shared dropdowns your attributes need, for example Status and Priority, with their options and colors, and decide which are Multiple choice. Then point the Dropdown attributes of your types at them. A dropdown created once can be used by every type, which keeps values consistent across requirements and tests.

Go to Trace types and add the relationships your process uses beyond the built-in Related, for example verifies / is verified by and derives / is derived from. Then open each item type and add its Traceability rules: which type it should trace to, with which trace type, whether the trace is Required, and whether a change Triggers suspect.

Decide the switch Allow trace creation with any other item type not specified in these rules now. Rules set before import mean imported items immediately show Missing rows for the traces they still need. See the article Trace types and traceability rules.

Go to Quality checks and switch on the INCOSE and EARS rules you want applied by default, by category or one by one. Then override per attribute on the item types where a rule does not apply, for example a rationale field that need not use "shall". See Quality checks.

Go to Members > User groups. The Organization Administrators group already exists and cannot be deleted; its members are the org admins. Create the groups you need, such as one per team or per supplier, and on each group's Permissions tab set Root permissions and any overrides on folders. Use the Resources tab to check a folder from the item's point of view.

Set groups up before inviting people, because the invite dialog asks which groups to put each person in. See the articles User groups and access control and Roles and permissions reference, and Managing users.

If your company uses an OIDC identity provider, go to SSO, register the callback URL in your provider, fill in the provider details and your email domains, save, and switch Enable SSO on. Without SSO, members sign in with Google, Microsoft, GitHub or an email magic link. See Single Sign-On (SSO).

Go to AI Providers, enable the models your team may use and set the default model. The Space Agent chat, the AI reviewer, Fix issues with AI and AI suggested traces all need a default model; add your own provider key if your policy requires it. See the article AI providers.

Go to Integrations. Connect Jira and GitHub if your team links requirements to tickets and pull requests, copy the MCP server configuration for people who work from Claude, Cursor or VS Code, and create API clients for scripts. See the articles Jira and GitHub integrations and API clients, and MCP server setup.

Now bring in existing documents. Hover the folder in the Items tree that should hold them, click ... > Import, and pick a Word, ReqIF or CSV file. The importer maps headings and columns to the item types you created in step 1, and the rules from step 3 mark what still needs tracing. See Importing documents.

Finally, click Invite at the bottom of the left sidebar, add email addresses and choose the user groups for each person. Point them at the article Your first hour in Trace.Space.