Best practices
Run Trove for a team
Updated 6 Oct 2026
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For agents
Load this page when: you need to set up Trove for several people or publish a book
- Share team knowledge with
trove team access grant <id>. Do not keep it in a personal library or a repo file. - Default to read access. Set write access only for the person with authority over the topic.
- Scope books to the reader's department and nearby departments with
trove team access scope. - Before a book goes public, list personal data and company secrets by page. Publish only after an explicit yes.
Summary
A team shares one set of books. Departments decide who reads what, and only people with authority over a topic should change its book. Publishing to the marketplace is your choice, and you check the book first.
Want your agent to follow these practices? Ask it: "Read How to Use Trove in my Trove library and follow it."
Put team knowledge in the team library
Team playbooks, guides and runbooks belong in the team library. If you keep them in a personal library, a chat message or a repo file, your teammates and their agents cannot read them.
Write the book, then ask your agent to share it with the team. A project shelf that you commit to the repo then points every teammate's agent at the same books. See Shelves.
Put this guide in the team library for engineering.Your teammates get the best results when they ask explicitly, for example "Search my Trove library for our deploy runbook." Trove has automatic checks, and we are actively working on making the librarian start automatically and reliably. Today your team should not rely on that. When the answer matters, ask.
Give write access only to the owner of the topic
Share a book with read access by default. A team guide is an authority, and many writers make it drift. Give write access to the person who owns the topic. Ask your agent:
Give write access to the "Deploy runbook" book in our Trove team library.Everyone else keeps read access. Giving write access to a whole department saves time now and costs you later.
Share by department
People need the context of the teams they work with, not the whole company. A new teammate reads the books of their own department and of the departments near it.
Ask your agent to share the book with your department and the departments near it:
Share the "Deploy runbook" book in Trove with engineering and support only.To see which department reads which book, ask your agent: "Show me the Trove department matrix." Only an owner or admin can scope a share.
Check a book before it goes public
Anyone can read a public book. A later edit does not remove what people already read. So check the book before you publish it.
List each risky passage with its page. Remove names, emails, customer details and internal facts that you do not want public. Write the book privately first. A general field guide often works better than a book about one company.
Check this book for personal data and company secrets. List each passage with its page. Do not publish yet.Publish only when you say so
Publishing is your choice, and you cannot fully undo it. Let your agent prepare the book and stop. When the book is ready, say "publish it". Do not ask your agent to publish as a side step in another task. The marketplace has no fixed rules yet, only this guidance.
Direct CLI
Your agent runs these through the trove command. You can run them yourself in a terminal, but asking your agent is the recommended way: it picks the right flags, waits for processing and checks the result.
| Task | Command |
|---|---|
| Share a book with the team | trove team access grant <id> |
| Give write access | trove team access level <id> --access write |
| Share with chosen departments | trove team access scope <id> --dept <slug> (repeat --dept) |
| See which department reads which book | trove team access matrix |
See the CLI reference.
Related
- Teams explains departments and shared books.
- trove team lists every team command.
- Marketplace explains public books.
- Share a library walks through sharing step by step.