Rolling Scholarly Out to Your Team

Buying seats is the easy part. This guide is about the part that decides whether a team workspace sticks: what goes in it, who starts, and how you know it's working.

It assumes you've already created a workspace. If you haven't, start with Getting Started with Teams — the free trial includes 3 seats, so you can run week one before paying anything.

Week 1 — Pick one job, not the whole company

Team setup already asked you for a source and drafted a first artifact from it. That shared project is your starting point, not a blank page. Week 1 is about widening it into a real library for one recurring job.

The most common way a rollout stalls is starting with "everyone can use it for anything." Pick a single recurring job your team already does badly or slowly:

• Onboarding — turn the handbook, the policy PDFs, and a recorded walkthrough into a study pack and a quiz new hires actually finish.
• Product or sales enablement — turn release notes and spec docs into a short video explainer and a one-page brief per release.
• Training material — turn a subject-matter expert's recorded session into a lesson plan, a worksheet, and a set of flashcards.
• Client or research work — turn a stack of reports into a cited research summary the whole team can question.

Week 1 — Widen the shared Library

A thin library is the single biggest predictor of a rollout that doesn't take. Before more people arrive, put real material in:

1. Use the team project setup created, or make one for the job you picked.
2. Add the source documents, recordings, and decks people actually reach for — not summaries of them.
3. Open Share on the folder and choose Your team.

Share the sources, not just the outputs. A shared PDF can be turned into a dozen different things by a dozen different people; a shared summary can only be read.

Run the job yourself, end to end, before the wider invite. You'll produce the first genuinely useful artifact and learn what the Library still needs.

See Sharing with Your Team.

Week 2 — Invite the right first people

Invite the two or three people closest to that job, not the whole department. Give at least one of them Admin so you're not the only person who can add seats or fix access.

Send invitations from Team → People, or create a join link and drop it in your team chat. People is also where requests to join arrive for you to approve or deny.

Invite emails list the most recently shared work as links, so seeding the Library before you invite is what makes the invite land. Point everyone at that shared material and one concrete thing to try: "make yourself a quiz from the onboarding project" beats "have a play with it."

Week 2 — Set the guardrails once

Two admin settings are worth deciding early, in Team → Billing → Plan & AI models:

• Model access — which models and tiers members can use.
• Require Zero Data Retention — if your organization has a data-handling policy, turn this on and only models on approved zero-retention routes stay available.

Then set up a profile under Team → AI profiles: shared instructions, a preferred model, and your visual identity. Every teammate's slides, documents, and videos come out looking consistent without anyone re-typing the brief.

See Managing Your Team for both, and Data, Privacy, and Model Controls in Teams if someone needs to sign the policy off.

Week 3–4 — Check adoption honestly

Open Team → Overview → Activity. It opens on the last 30 days and can be switched to the last 7. You're looking for one thing: is more than one person creating?

• Several active members, steady creations — it's working. Add the next job and the next project.
• Activity concentrated in you — almost always a thin or wrong-shaped Library, not disinterest. Ask the quiet members what they were trying to do, and add the source they needed.
• People creating but not returning — the output was interesting rather than useful. Move to a job with a deadline attached to it.

The Library is the second signal worth reading: items carry a view count, so you can see which sources people actually opened — and which you thought mattered but nobody touched.

Activity reporting is aggregated on purpose: it shows counts, never content titles or prompts.

Then expand

Once the first job is running without you, repeat it: new job, new team-owned project so it survives whoever set it up, invite the people who own it. Teammates arriving through an invite land in the team Library, so make sure the new job's material is shared before the invites go out.

Seats can be added at any time from Team → Billing, and pending invitations hold a seat until they're accepted.

Common questions

Do people need training? No. Point them at one project and one task. The tools explain themselves once there's real material to point them at.

What if someone already pays for Scholarly personally? They keep whichever plan is stronger. Joining a team never downgrades anyone.

Can people see each other's private work? No. Content is private until someone explicitly chooses Your team, and admin reporting shows counts, not content.

Can we get the output out of Scholarly? Yes — see Exporting Your Work.

What if we outgrow 29 seats? That's the self-serve ceiling. Contact us from the Teams page and we'll take it from there — that's also the route for a rollout across departments, or for invoicing and purchase orders.

Related

• Getting Started with Teams — create the workspace and invite people.
• Sharing with Your Team — build the shared Library.
• Your Team Library and Team Projects — the natural unit for each new job.
• Managing Your Team — roles, model access, profiles, and Activity.
• Scholarly Teams — trial, pricing, and what each seat includes.