Building Blocks
Before doing anything in GLYPH, picture the shape of the platform. It's built from six concepts. Get these straight and the rest of the documentation falls into place.
Workspace
A workspace is your organization's home in GLYPH. It contains your groups, teams, admin settings, and the memberships connecting users to your organization. Most orgs only need one — think of it like a single Slack instance or Teams tenant.
The workspace is the boundary. Groups, teams, and admin controls all stop at its edge. Your admin authority does too.
Users
The most important distinction to internalize early: users and their devices exist outside of any single workspace. A user is a person with a GLYPH account; their account, identity, and devices belong to them, not your organization.
A user can be in many workspaces at once — a contractor working with two clients, an executive sitting on a partner's board, a vendor with access to several customers. In each workspace, that user can hold a different role, see different groups, and have different teams assigned. None of that bleeds across.
As an admin, your responsibility extends only to your workspace's view of a user. You decide their role here, which of your groups they're in, and which of their devices can participate in your groups. You cannot see their other workspaces, manage their identity, reset their account, or touch their devices in any other context.
Groups
Groups are where conversations happen — the GLYPH equivalent of a Slack channel: a persistent, topic-scoped space where members exchange messages, share files, and run video huddles.
Every group is defined by three independent settings at creation: visibility, posting mode, and crypto scheme. See Group Settings for the full breakdown.
Groups are the unit of conversation. They're also the unit of access control — being "in a group" is what gives you the ability to see its messages.
Direct Messages
Direct messages (DMs) are 1:1 or small-group conversations outside any group. Use them for off-topic chatter, quick questions, or small ad-hoc coordination. Same encryption model as groups; just lighter-weight and not organized around a stable membership.
DMs are for transient or personal exchanges. Anything that benefits from a stable membership or a topic belongs in a group.
Teams
Teams are easy to misread. Despite the name, a team is not a conversation surface — you don't post in a team, and a team has no messages of its own. A team is a tagging primitive: a named bundle of people that you can @mention inside any group.
Example: create a team engineering-leads with five members. Later, in a project group, someone types @engineering-leads — the tag notifies all five who are already in that project group. Team members who aren't in the group don't get notified, and don't gain access. (Intentional, and an encryption requirement — see Security Model.)
Teams are how you address cross-cutting groups of people by name. They sit alongside groups, not inside them.
Devices
In most collaboration tools, "a user" and "their account" are interchangeable. In GLYPH, what really matters is devices. Every phone, laptop, or browser someone logs in from is authenticated individually and added to their device list. One person with a work laptop, personal phone, and tablet = three trust decisions, not one.
Part of GLYPH's zero-trust model, and it shapes admin work directly: when you "add someone to a group," you're really choosing which of their devices are in that group. When you remove someone, you're choosing which devices lose access.
The device model has consequences worth understanding in their own right. See The Device Model for the deep dive.