Team chat

The team chat is your organization’s internal coordination, in the same window as the situation view. It belongs to your team, and the support chat in the bottom right corner stays your line to us.

Where it lives

On the web, the Team chat button at the bottom center of the screen opens it. On the iPhone, the chat symbol sits in the top bar, next to your account, on every screen. On the iPad it stays at the bottom right, where the docked window slides in beside your work.

On the iPad, the conversation is a docked window: it stays open while you keep working in the cockpit, acknowledge incidents, or look at monitors. That is the point of it: during an incident you need both, the numbers and the conversation. On the iPhone, the same symbol opens the conversation full screen.

Symbol and button carry a badge with the number of unread messages, and every route shows the same conversations.

Three kinds of channels

Direct messages go to one person in your organization. They start from the plus in the channel list, and there is exactly one per pair.

Incident channels start from an incident: in the incident view, you open a channel for every member or for the on-call rota. Whoever is on duty right now comes first in the member list. The channel is named after the affected monitor, or after the summary of a manually created incident, so the channel list says what it is about instead of showing an identifier.

Organization channels are open rooms for every member.

Who sees what

A channel, history included, is visible to its members alone, and they are the ones who post to it. Between organizations, the database itself separates the data: messages of one organization are out of reach for another, independently of the application.

When somebody leaves the organization, their messages stay and their name goes. That is the same rule the timeline of an incident follows.

Notifications

A new message reaches every member of the channel except its sender: straight into the conversation while the app is open, otherwise as a notification on the iPhone or iPad.

Two rules keep notifications useful:

• Whoever is looking gets no banner. With that conversation open on screen, the message is already there.
• A muted channel stays completely silent. No banner, no sound, no count. Muting is per channel: the bell inside a conversation, a swipe in the list.

A chat notification uses the normal sound and respects focus modes and the silent switch. Breaking through stays reserved for alerting, so an alert keeps its meaning. What an escalation does instead is described under Alerting and on-call.

Correcting and deleting

A right click on one of your own messages (in the app: a long press) opens a menu with Edit and Delete. Every author controls their own messages: nobody else, including the owner of the organization, can change or remove them.

Both actions stay visible, which keeps the channel trustworthy as a record:

• A corrected message carries the marker edited, so everyone in a channel where decisions are made sees that it changed.
• A deleted message keeps its place and reads Message deleted. The text is gone and the gap stays visible, because an incident channel is part of the incident’s documentation.

An edit replaces the previous wording.

Good to know

A message holds up to 4,000 characters, and history loads in pages of 50 messages as you scroll back.

Next

• Alerting and on-call: how an escalation reaches the people in the channel.
• Incidents and post-mortems: write the post-mortem once the incident closes.