The quick question, beside the record
Not everything is a ticket. A clarifying question, a screenshot, checking you are both talking about the same thing: support chat is where that happens, one room per project, live over an open connection rather than on a polling delay.
Clients and your own team, told apart at a glance
In the team workspace the room list has three tabs, All, Clients and Internal, each with its own unread count, and the tab you pick is remembered on that device. Under All the rooms sit in three sections: direct messages between colleagues, client rooms, and the internal team. Client rooms carry a purple edge and internal rooms a green one, and every client row shows the client's name under the project name, because project names collide across clients. An organisation can be marked internal, and its rooms then sort under the internal team as long as everybody in them is staff.
Your team creates ad hoc rooms and manages their members. Rooms tied to a project or an organisation cannot be deleted or have people removed, and the app says so rather than failing quietly. For a client, rooms and participants are set up for them, so the page has no create or invite button at all.
- Search covers the room name, the client organisation and the last message
- View Project in the header of a project room jumps to the project
- Approving somebody into a project adds them to its support chat in the same step
- On a phone the list and the conversation take turns filling the screen
Direct messages
Clients
Internal team
Point at a record without pasting a reference
Type an at sign and at least two characters of a title, and your matching issues and feature or change records are offered. Choosing one drops its reference into the message. Hovering it afterwards shows a summary card with a link, and clicking it opens the record, which is what makes a mention usable on a touch screen too.
That is the join between the conversation and the work: a question in chat can point at the thing it is about, and the thing it is about stays the system of record.
- Your own messages carry edit and delete, with long-press actions on a phone
- An edited message is marked, and a deleted one leaves a placeholder rather than a hole
- Edits and deletes you missed while offline are recovered when the connection comes back
Is this the same Safari export problem?
Hover for the summary card, click to open the record
One set of file limits, enforced in both places
Up to 5 files, 20MB per file and 50MB per message, checked in the composer and enforced by the server, so the rule you read is the rule that applies. Pictures are shown in the conversation rather than as a chip; anything else appears as a named attachment button.
Notifications for a room are one notification that updates in place with the latest sender and message, rather than one per line. Opening it goes straight to the conversation.
- Pictures, GIFs and videos waiting to go show as thumbnails, each with its own remove button
- An iPhone photo is turned into a JPEG in the browser before it uploads, so everybody can see it
- Coming back to a backgrounded tab catches the chat list up straight away
- Attachments over 1MB work in chat and in comments alike
Attachment limits
The room grew up, and the client side got all of it
A project room is a proper messenger now, and none of it was held back from the people outside your team. Reply and the message you are answering is quoted above yours, react with any emoji, pin what matters into a bar at the top of the room, forward a message to another chat, save one for yourself, or ask to be reminded about it later. Fenced code renders as a block with a copy button, which is what you want when the thing being discussed is an error somebody pasted.
Voice notes are held down to record, slid left to throw away and slid up to keep going hands free, and they play back in a small bubble with a scrub bar. The room's own page carries its facts as cards with Members, Files and Links tabs, and Links finds every URL ever sent in it.
- The message menu opens on a long press or a right click, with the conversation behind blurred
- Chat messages stay off the notifications page: the sidebar item carries a red unread count instead
- Where push is off on every device, one email per conversation every half hour at most
The things teams ask about this
Is chat a replacement for commenting on the record?
No, and treating it as one is how context gets lost. Chat is the quick back and forth: a clarifying question, a screenshot, agreeing what you are looking at. Anything that has to be tracked belongs in a comment on the record, where it is part of the timeline and travels with the work if the request is converted.
Who decides which people are in a room?
Your team. Project and organisation rooms have their membership managed alongside the project, and approving somebody into a project adds them to its room in the same step. Ad hoc rooms are created by whoever needs them, with a title, a description and a list of people, and only the person who created one can delete it. Clients have no create or invite controls at all, so a room appearing for them is always a decision somebody made.
What happens to messages sent while I was offline?
They are there when you come back, and so are the corrections. Reconnecting recovers the edits and deletes that happened while you were away, so you are not left reading a version of the conversation that no longer exists, and returning to a backgrounded tab catches the room list up immediately rather than at the next check.
Can a client read the internal team's conversation?
Only the rooms they are a participant in, which are the ones your team put them in. Internal rooms are not listed for them and internal records are not offered when they type a mention. As everywhere else in the product, that is enforced on the server rather than by hiding a control.
Where this connects to the rest of it
See it against your own work
Thirty minutes on a call, one of your real client projects on the screen, and an honest answer about whether this part of the product earns its place in how you work.
partnerships@dhcertainty.com