Team chat

The team chat is your organization’s internal coordination, in the same window as the situation view. It does not replace the support chat in the bottom right corner, which reaches us: this one belongs to your team.

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. An iPhone has no width for that, so there 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 only. 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 rather than showing an identifier.

Organization channels are open rooms for every member.

Who sees what

A channel is visible, history included, only to its members. Anyone who is not a member does not see it in the list and cannot post to it. Between organizations the database itself separates: 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 about that, both deliberate:

• Whoever is looking is not nudged. With that conversation open on screen, no banner appears. 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 deliberately does not sound like an outage: normal sound, no breaking through focus or the silent switch. That force stays with alerting, so that it 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. Other people’s messages can neither be changed nor removed, not even by the owner of the organization.

Both stay visible, and that is deliberate:

• A corrected message carries the marker edited. A silent correction would be a trap in a channel where decisions are made.
• A deleted message keeps its place and reads Message deleted. The text is gone, the gap stays visible: an incident channel is part of the documentation of an incident, and a hole in a timeline somebody later relies on would be worse than a visible blank.

There is no version history: the previous wording is not kept.

Limits

A message holds up to 4,000 characters. History loads in pages of 50 messages as you scroll back. There are no file attachments.