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Team Chat first-run setup

Team Chat is internal messaging for the people who run your Orbit workspace. This page takes a fresh workspace from an empty rail to a working channel and a first direct message, and explains the presence and notification behavior you see along the way. For the day-to-day workflows (on-call handoffs, Inbox escalations, threads, huddles), continue with the team chat guide; for the object model behind the surface, see the team chat model.

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Create your first channel

  1. Open Chat in the dashboard sidebar.
  2. Create a channel and give it a purpose-first name: support, ops, billing-specialists. Channels persist and search runs over them, so name them for the work they hold, not for this week’s topic. The name you pick is the name every teammate sees.
  3. Post a first message. You are the channel’s owner; everyone you add joins as member until you promote them.
  4. Invite your first teammates from the channel’s member rail, adding each by their user ID (the Team page lists your workspace’s users and their IDs). Only a channel owner or admin adds and removes members.
Membership is the visibility boundary: a channel appears only to its members, search never surfaces a channel you are not in, and removing a member cuts their access immediately, with no separate revocation step.

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Start a direct message

A DM is a two-participant thread for the conversations that do not belong in a channel. Opening a DM to a teammate returns the existing thread when one already exists, so there is exactly one thread per pair of people. Only the two participants can read or post to it; an admin cannot browse someone else’s DM.

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Read the rails: icons and badges

  • Channels carry a # icon. A channel with activity you have not opened renders emphasized with an unread dot; opening the channel clears it.
  • Direct messages list by your counterpart’s name with their presence dot. Unread DMs carry a numeric badge (counting up to 99+), measured against your read cursor on the thread.
  • A conversation you are looking at marks itself read as messages arrive, so a badge never lingers on the thread you are watching.

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Presence, and how it composes with ACD presence

Each rail row shows a presence dot: online and away as your teammates report them, and offline derived when heartbeats stop. A closed tab ages out of the online window about a minute after its last beat, while “last seen” stays readable afterwards. This collaboration presence answers “can I expect a reply right now?” and is deliberately separate from the presence your voice routing reads. An agent’s ACD state (available, busy, wrapup, paused, offline) drives dispatch and eligibility; a Team Chat heartbeat never changes it, and an aux-code change never moves the Team Chat dot. The two lifecycles side by side are in Agent presence and aux-code lifecycle.

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Notifications: what reaches the bell and what stays in-page

  • Bell. Every channel message writes a notification to the bell for every other member of the channel, and every DM writes one to its recipient, so a handoff post reaches the incoming responder even while they work the Inbox.
  • In-page only. Team Chat notifications live in the dashboard: they never leave as email or digest, regardless of your outbound notification toggles. Presence changes and typing indicators render live on the page and write no bell row at all.
  • Mentions. Team Chat notifies on every message in channels you belong to, so nobody needs to be tagged to see a channel post. The mention notification you may know from Inbox notes applies to customer-facing notes, not to Team Chat.

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Example: stand up the on-call #ops channel

The pain this cures: after-hours coordination riding on a personal SMS group thread, with no read state, no search, no record of who saw the handoff, and internal chatter on customer-adjacent phones. Stand up the channel instead:
  1. Create ops with the description “On-call coordination: handoffs and incident chatter.”
  2. Add every responder, and pair the channel with your rotation using the on-call alerting guide so the pager and the channel agree on who is responding.
  3. Post each handoff in the channel. The unread badge shows who has not seen it yet, and search rediscovers everything mentioning the incident id after the fact.
  4. When text gets too slow, start a huddle in the same channel; it ends by itself when the last participant leaves.
Nothing posted in ops reaches a customer, and no customer-facing message is touched by Team Chat: the channel replaces the SMS thread without touching any outbound messaging.

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When something looks broken

An empty who’s-online rail that refills on the next poll, or a huddle badge that lingers a moment, is degrade-open behavior working as designed. Diagnose each state in Team Chat and Huddle state surprises.

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See also