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Support timeline vs archived search: which surface answers your question

Two dashboard surfaces both answer “find the old conversation,” but they search opposite sides of the relationship. The Support → Timeline page is your organization’s own history with Devotel Orbit support — every request your team opened with us, with the full thread on each. The archived-conversation search is the inverse — your workspace’s customer-facing history, the conversations your customers had with you. Reaching for the wrong one is the common mistake: the search term is in the other surface, so the lookup comes back empty. This guide maps which surface holds which history so the search lands the first time.

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What the Support → Timeline surface shows

Support → Timeline is the support-history reader. Each row is one request your organization opened with Devotel Orbit — whether it started as a phone call, a chat, or a help-center form — and it expands in place to reveal the complete public thread: your original request, every reply, in chronological order. It exists so a support interaction never starts from zero: you never re-explain the port-out or the billing dispute to a fresh agent, because the full thread is one click away. The rows are your support requests, not your customers’. A row carries the subject and a quotable reference, the status, response cues that tell you whose turn it is (Awaiting reply / Replied), priority and category, and the opened / last-updated / resolved timestamps. The full reference is Support history (Support → Timeline). Visibility follows your tenant’s own role setup: any authenticated member whose role includes the dashboard Support section reads the same history, and a member whose role excludes it sees an access-restricted notice instead — an owner or admin adjusts the member’s role. Replying on an open request needs a seat allowed to post on the tenant’s inbox tickets; a read-only member can read the thread here but cannot answer it. The role FAQ on the full reference spells all three cases out.

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What the archived-conversation search shows

The archived-conversation search is the handover surface on the Inbox Archive page — the permanent historical record of the conversations your customers had with your workspace, across every connected channel. It answers the questions that reach past the live queue: “what did we promise this account,” “pull everything this customer ever told us,” “has anyone handled this case on any channel.” It’s a free-text, full-message search confined to archived conversations, and each result deep-links into the canonical inbox thread. The rows are your customers’ conversations, not your requests to Orbit. It’s the surface a support agent uses to orient a sales owner before a renewal call. The full reference is Search the archived conversation timeline for sales/support handover. The two surfaces sit at opposite ends of the support relationship, so a single keyword only ever lives in one of them. Work the decision in this order: Two tells you’re on the wrong surface:
  • The Support history returns No support requests yet for a term you know you discussed with a customer — that thread is a customer conversation, so it lives in the archive, not in your requests to Orbit.
  • The archive search returns nothing for a ticket number you quoted to Orbit support — that reference is a request you opened with us, so it lives on the Support history, not in your customer archive.
When you’re genuinely not sure which side the conversation was on, run the term on both — the two lists are independent, and a match on either is a definitive answer.

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Search semantics: what the free-text box actually matches

Both surfaces search free text, but the two boxes reach different depths — and only one of them claims metadata. Matching the keyword to the wrong depth reads exactly like matching it to the wrong surface: the search comes back empty again. Support → Timeline searches inside the conversation: the subject, your original request (the summary or transcript captured when the request opened), and every public reply in the thread. It does not match request metadata (status, priority, category) or attachment names. The archive search on the Inbox Archive page reaches message bodies plus contact identity — the contact’s name, phone number, or email — so a phone prefix or an email domain finds threads even when no message mentions them. And that box is confined to archived conversations only: a thread still sitting in the live queue never surfaces there, no matter how precisely the keyword matches. Both effects are covered in the linked references — find a past conversation explains the full-thread scope, and searching archived conversations details body-plus-identity matching and the archived-only confinement. The routing consequence is what matters here: a metadata-only keyword (a status word, a priority, an attachment filename) can’t find a Support ticket by its subject, and a live customer conversation can’t be found in the archive — exactly the empty-result shapes the tells above catch.

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Roles and visibility

Neither surface introduces its own permission gate — visibility on both follows your tenant’s own role setup, and dashboard section restriction is a tenant-owned control.
  • Read. For Support → Timeline, any authenticated member whose role includes the dashboard Support section sees the same history. For the archive search, any member who can read the inbox can search archived conversations — it carries the same conversations:read gate the inbox uses.
  • Reply. Writing back on an open Support ticket needs a seat allowed to post on the tenant’s inbox tickets; a read-only member reads the thread but cannot answer it from either surface.
  • Restricted roles. A member whose role setup excludes a surface sees an access-restricted notice instead of the list; an owner or admin adjusts the member’s role.
  • API. The export endpoint requires an API key for your organization and returns that organization’s history only.

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Worked example: the quoted reference ORB-1234

A colleague says “we quoted ticket ORB-1234 months ago — pull it up.” Run the two decides in order and the tells resolve it without guessing:
  1. Try Support → Timeline first. References that get quoted to Devotel Orbit support are overwhelmingly your own request ids — and the full-thread search covers every reply, so the request surfaces even if ORB-1234 only appears deep in the thread. If it’s yours, you’re done.
  2. Empty here is a definitive tell, not a dead end. No support requests yet on that surface hands you the answer: the reference isn’t a request your team filed with us, so the thread is a customer conversation — it lives in the archive, not in your requests to us.
  3. Search the Inbox Archive page next. The identity-plus-body match can surface the thread even when the reference lives in a customer’s own subject line — a phrasing your agents never typed. And if the archive returns nothing either, the inverse tell applies back: that conversation was never archived, so re-check the live queue or the Support timeline rather than repeating the same box.
Either match is definitive; the empty state on one surface routes you to the other rather than back to the search box.

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Export the Support history as a file

The export endpoint the Support → Timeline surface cites — GET /api/v1/inbox/tickets/export — deserves one more clause than the introduction gave it. format=csv ships one flat row per request (subject, status, priority, category, and timestamps as columns); format=json returns the same request envelope, and adding include_comments=true inlines each request’s full public reply thread. Export stays scoped to your own organization.
An export key carries exactly your organization’s scope — the same rule the roles list above states for the API — and every response’s meta.request_id (a req_… request id) is the reference to quote to Orbit support if a pull ever misbehaves. Reach for the file over the in-page search when the question is a slice rather than a lookup: the auditor who needs every resolved request from last quarter, the BI import of last year’s volume, any pull where “all of them” beats “the one I remember.” For a single remembered keyword, the page search still wins — the export’s job is the bulk pull, and the full column and filter detail lives on the reference page.

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See also