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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 free-text box searches inside the conversation — the subject, your original request, and every reply — not just the title. The export endpoint (GET /api/v1/inbox/tickets/export) downloads the same history as CSV or JSON. The full reference is Support history (Support → Timeline).

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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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See also