Direct messaging in Chat (App)

This article provides an overview of direct messaging in Chat in App.

In this article

Overview

A direct message is a private conversation between either:

• Yourself and one or more coworkers, or

• Yourself and a single external phone number (if have a number routed to your DID)

Note: Direct messages cannot include a mix of coworkers and external users. 

If your administrator has provisioned a phone number to a direct message conversation, the group can host voice calls that may or may not require a conference pin.

Continue reading this article for a breakdown of each of the elements related to direct messaging in App.

Visual breakdown

• Creating Direct Messages: Users can create direct, private messages to coworkers, external phone numbers (if the user has their number routed to their DID), or to themselves (private channels that only the user can see, indicated by the channel suffix “you”. See the screenshot above for an example). Users may see some or all of these in their Direct Messages list.
  
  With direct messages between a user and a coworker, notice the square to the left of the coworker’s name; this reflects their user availability status. Here you can also hover over the status indicator to read their status message.

• SMS Message (A): When creating a direct message to an external number or receiving an SMS sent to your DID, the message populates under the Direct Messages list. Here you can exchange messages with the external source in the same manner that you chat with your coworkers. As noted above, you must have a direct dial phone number (DID) provisioned to your user by your administrator within Console in order to send or receive SMS messages in Chat.

• Muted Channel (B): When you mute a public or private channel, the color of the channel changes to a lighter color, and you will not receive notifications. If you unmute the channel, the color will revert and you’ll start receiving notifications again.

• Conference Info (C): The Conference Info button allows you to join a Sync video conference for the active messaging channel. In the image above, click the Conference Info button, then click Join to join the Sync video conference session.

• Day line break (D): The day line break is a visible line that separates messages from previous days from more current messages. If the message is one day old the day line break will display “yesterday”, if it is older it will display the date.

• System messages (E): System messages show information about changes within the channel. These messages display when users join or leave a channel, are added or removed from a channel, and if the name of a channel changes.

• Timestamp (F): Timestamps show the time when messages are sent. The time stamp either appears to the right of the user’s name or to the left of the message (if the message was sent quickly after another message from the same user). If you can not see the timestamp for a message, hover over the message to view it.

• Modify Users (G): Users have the ability to add or remove other users from a direct message once the chat has been created. When adding or removing users from a direct message channel, the system keeps the original chat as is and creates a new direct message channel with the new group of users.  

• Conference Settings (H): After creating a new direct message conversation, users have the option to modify the Conference Settings, including adding a password, modifying the access key, and modifying the conference pin. Note that this feature is only useful for conversations that have a phone number provisioned to it by an account Admin.

• Archiving (I): When archiving a direct message channel, the chat is removed from the direct messages list of all users who are a part of the messaging channel and those users no longer have access to the chat’s details and conversations. Most importantly, the archiving of a direct message is currently irreversible, so users can not unarchive a direct message.