Running a support chat room

Chat is rooms with members, live over an open connection rather than on a polling delay.

1. Open Support Chat. The left column lists your rooms with the last message, the time, and an unread count. Search them with the Search chats box; it matches the room name, the client organization and the last message.
2. Click a room to open it. The header shows the room name, how many people are in it, and the client organization it belongs to, because room names are project names and those collide across clients.
3. Type in the Write a message box and press Enter, or use the send button. Click the paperclip to attach files first; they are listed above the box and can be removed before you send.
4. Hover your own message to reveal its edit and delete buttons. On a phone, long press a message instead: the sheet offers Copy text, Edit and Delete, with Cancel underneath.
5. Click the menu button in the header to open the details panel, with the room description and its participants.
6. Use Add User in that panel to bring someone else in. Delete Chat is there too, but only for rooms you created yourself; rooms tied to a project or an organization cannot be deleted or have people removed, and the app says so if you try.
7. Click View Project in the header of a project room to jump to the project it belongs to.
8. To start a new room, click Actions, then Create Chat, and fill in Title, Description and Select Users.

Messaging a colleague directly

A direct chat needs no room, no title and no invitation. Click the pencil button beside Search chats, type a colleague’s name or email address, and pick them: the conversation opens, and it is the same conversation they see from their side however many times either of you starts it.

A direct chat is the two of you and stays that way. It is named after the other person rather than after a room, so the list, the header and the info panel all show their name and their photo, with online beside it while they have the conversation open. There is nobody to add, nobody to remove and nothing to delete, so those options are not offered. Only colleagues appear in the picker: client contacts keep their per-project support chats.

Everything else is unchanged. Attachments, voice notes, edits, deletes, mentions, unread counts and notifications all work exactly as they do in a room.

Links you type are clickable in the message itself, and every link a conversation has ever carried is listed under Links in the info panel.

Connections drop, on trains, in lifts, on hotel wifi. When yours comes back, the edits and deletes you missed while away are recovered, so you are not left reading a version of the conversation that no longer exists. A deleted message leaves a “message deleted” placeholder rather than a hole, and an edited one is marked “(edited)”.

On a phone the room list and the conversation share the screen: opening a room replaces the list, and Back in the header brings it back.