Team Chat: message, call and find your colleagues
Communication > Team Chat is where you reach the people you work with. It has four tabs: Chats for your private conversations and your groups, Projects Discussion for the room everyone shares (General) and one room per project, Team for the directory of everyone here, and Calls for the calls you have had with colleagues. The Team tab lists everyone in your workspace, shows whether they are free right now, and gives you a call button and a message button on each person. It is separate from Phone & Messages, which is for calling and texting your customers; a call to a colleague never appears there. Colleagues used to be its own sidebar entry; the old address still works and brings you here.
A conversation opens on the newest message, and scrolling up loads what came before, fifty lines at a time. If you are reading older messages when a new one arrives, a small "new messages" button appears; press it to go back to the bottom. Your Chats list puts the conversations you have pinned first (up to five, people or groups) and everything else in the order of the last message. Open the menu on any row to pin it, mute it, give it a colour or mark it unread, and use the filter buttons at the top for unread, groups or people. The colour shows beside the name, so a project group, a client group and a friend can be told apart at a glance.
Every message has a menu: reply with a quote, forward it to other conversations, copy its text, edit it (your own, any time, and it says "edited"), pin it to the top of the room (up to ten per room; the pinned strip under the header pages through them), save it for yourself (find them under Saved at the top of the page), mark the conversation unread from that message, see who has read it in a group, or delete it. A message you sent can be deleted for everyone; in a channel or a group an admin can delete anyone's. The Search button at the top finds words across every conversation you are in, or inside one room, newest first.
The message box has the whole emoji set with a search box, skin tones and your recent ones; a microphone for voice messages (hold to talk and let go to send, or click to record hands-free, up to five minutes, with a player that can speed up); and, behind the paperclip, a poll (up to twelve options, one answer or several, with an optional end time), your current location as a map link, a colleague's card, and a photo taken on the spot on a phone. A screenshot pasted into the box or a file dropped onto it attaches straight away. Text can carry *bold*, _italic_, ~strikethrough~ and `code`, the way WhatsApp writes them. When somebody is typing, a line above the box says so.
Pictures open in WorkBOS's own photo viewer, never in a new browser tab: it fills the screen the way an office document does, pages through every picture in the room with the arrow keys or a swipe, zooms with the wheel or a pinch, and can save the picture to your device, save it to Drive, rename it, forward it, jump to the message it came from, and make simple edits (crop, rotate, flip, brightness and contrast), which are sent into the conversation as an edited copy. Every picture, file, link and record ever shared in a room is under the room's info panel, with filters by type, by sender and by name.
Sharing from your phone: when WorkBOS is installed as an app on Android, or on Chrome or Edge on a computer, it appears in the share sheet like any other app, so a screenshot, a photo, a document or a link can be shared straight into a conversation. iPhone and iPad do not offer web apps in the share sheet; there, use the paperclip inside the conversation.
To delete a conversation, open the menu on the person in the Chats list and choose Delete chat: it leaves your list and its messages are hidden from you, the other person keeps their copy, and if they write to you again it comes back with only the new messages. A group you manage has Delete group in the same menu and in its info panel: that is for everyone, for good, with every message in it; Archive is the gentler choice that keeps the history. The tick-box button at the top of the list lets you select several conversations and groups and delete them together. The Calls tab reads like a phone's call log: grouped by day, each line says what happened and for how long, tapping a line opens the full details right under it, Call back is one press, and the bin on a line, or Select for several, deletes entries from your own history only.
Groups are conversations you make. In Chats, press New group, give it a name, and pick people or start from a team: the team's members come in and its name is offered. A group has three settings, each either everyone or admins only: who can send messages, who can edit the group's name and description, and who can add people. All three start as everyone. The person who creates a group is its first admin; admins can make others admins, remove people, change the settings and archive the group. Anyone can leave. If the last admin leaves, the longest-standing member becomes admin. Every change is written into the conversation as a quiet line, so nobody has to wonder who added whom. Clients and other guests can never be in a group. Open a group's name to see its members, change the settings, mute it for eight hours, a week or until you say otherwise, or pin it to the top of your list.
Every message box has a paperclip. Attach files from your device (they are scanned before they are kept), a link, or something that already lives in WorkBOS: a Drive file, a project, a task, a client, an invoice, an estimate, a proposal, a contract, a lead, a deal, a contact, a meeting or a signature request. Up to ten per message. A WorkBOS record shows as a card that opens the record, and a file in a group can be opened only by the people in that group.
Ask the room for answers. Behind the same paperclip, next to Poll, "Form: ask for answers" builds a small form without leaving the conversation: give it a title ("Your size for the uniforms", "What do you need this week?"), add fields such as a drop-down with an optional "other" box to write in, a number, a short answer, remarks, tick boxes, yes or no, or a date, and choose whether everyone in the room sees the answers or only you and the admins. Three ready-made shapes get you started. It goes into the message as a card; the people in that conversation press Fill in, answer once each, and can change their answer until you close the form. Answers opens a summary (a bar for each choice, totals and averages for numbers, every remark with its author, and who has not answered yet) and a sheet of who said what and when, with a CSV download. The second tab of the sheet attaches a published form you already have. A form asked here is a real form under CRM > Forms, so who may ask is whoever may build forms, and the same answers are on its page there with a Who column; it has no public link.
Type @ to mention a colleague, a team, one of your AI agents or Chief; move through the menu with the arrow keys and choose with Enter or Tab. Type # to link a task or a project. Mentioning a person or a team notifies them. Mentioning an agent hands it your message and whatever it proposes goes to Agent Approvals; mentioning Chief opens Chief with the conversation as context. You can reply to a specific message with a quote, react to any message, and the emoji picker closes when you click elsewhere.
Availability is worked out for you rather than typed. Somebody is shown as Available when their browser has checked in within the last five minutes, On a call when they are actually on one, In a meeting when the calendar says so (with the time it ends, so you know whether to wait), Away when they have been idle, or Do not disturb when they have chosen it. The only one you set yourself is Do not disturb, using the button at the top right. With it on, colleagues can still message you but the call button beside your name is switched off.
The same states show as a dot on people everywhere in Team Chat, not only on the Team tab: green is available, grey is away, red is do not disturb, amber is in a meeting and blue is on a call. Rest the mouse on a dot to read it in words; in a direct conversation the words are under the person's name, with the time a meeting or a do-not-disturb ends, so a phone gets the same answer without a hover. Your own dot is at the top of Team Chat; press it to set Do not disturb for an hour, four hours or until tomorrow morning, and it switches itself off at that time. Available means WorkBOS is open on any page, not only the Team tab; close it or leave the tab in the background and you are away within five minutes.
Reactions are one face per person: choose an emoji under a message and it is yours on that message; choose a different one and it replaces the first rather than sitting beside it; press your own face again to take it back. Other people's faces are theirs, so a message can still carry several different emojis when several people react.
Unread messages are counted everywhere, in red: on Team chat in the sidebar (every direct message, group and discussion you have not read, added up), on the Chats and Projects Discussion tabs, on each person and group in the Chats list, and on General and each project in the Projects Discussion rail (on a phone, the room picker shows the count after the room's name). A count clears the moment you open the room, and messages that arrive while you are looking at a conversation are read as they land. A room you muted keeps its count on its own line but adds nothing to a tab or the sidebar, and a new colleague starts counting from the day they joined, not from the beginning of time. Mark unread from here, in a message's menu, brings a line back into the count in any room, a discussion included.
A popup tells you about a new message wherever you are in WorkBOS: a small card with the person's picture and name, where they wrote, and the message, which opens the conversation when you press it. Out of the box it appears for direct messages and whenever somebody tags you with @ in a group, a project discussion or General; it never appears for the conversation already in front of you, for a room you muted (unless you were tagged), or while your status is Do not disturb. The Popups button at the top of Team Chat, or the small gear on any popup, opens your own settings: switch popups off entirely, choose which arrivals pop up (direct messages, tags, every group message, every discussion message), show or hide the message text (hide it on a screen other people can see), pick the corner of the screen, choose how long a card stays or keep it until you close it, turn the sound off, allow popups through Do not disturb, and ask the browser to notify you when WorkBOS is in a background tab. Try it shows a sample card so you can see the effect at once. These settings are yours alone; the red counts stay on whatever you choose.
Every message has two deletes in its menu. Delete for me takes it off your own screen and nobody else's, with an Undo in the toast. Delete for everyone (your own messages; a group admin or the workspace owner can delete anybody's) leaves a quiet "This message was deleted" marker in its place for every reader, so a gap in a conversation is never a mystery, and the toast offers Undo for one minute; after that the words are gone for good, including any picture or file. You alone are told whether anybody had read it first. The workspace owner can limit how long after sending a member may delete for everyone (Team chat › Workspace settings › Messages: any time, 1 hour, 24 hours, 2 days or never); admins are not held to it, and everyone can always delete for themselves.
Disappearing messages are set per conversation. A group admin sets a group's timer from its info panel (24 hours, 7 days, 90 days or off) and either person sets a direct conversation's. Messages sent after that go on their own when their time is up, shown by a small hourglass beside the time; nothing already said is touched, the room says "disappear after 7 days" under its name, and a group records the change as a system line. General and project discussions have no timer.
Send later: the clock beside Send offers In 1 hour, Tomorrow at 9:00, Monday at 9:00 or a time you pick, up to 30 days ahead. WorkBOS holds the message and says it in the conversation at that minute in your name, whether or not you are online. A strip above the box shows what is waiting, with Cancel. Text only - files and polls go when you press Send - and if the room refuses the message when the time comes (you have left the group, say) it stays in the strip with the reason rather than vanishing.
Messages open your existing Team Chat conversation with that person, ready to type in. If you have never spoken before, the conversation is created as you arrive. Nothing is moved: the conversations you already have keep working exactly as before.
There are two ways to look at the same people, and the buttons for them are at the top left. Cards is the default and is built for reaching somebody: a tile each, grouped into who is free, who is busy and who is away. List is the normal WorkBOS table, so you can sort it, group it, choose your own columns, filter it and export it to a spreadsheet. Your choice is remembered.
You can narrow the list by department, by company and by team, and search by name, job title, department or team. A filter only appears when there is something behind it, so you will not see a Company filter until somebody in the workspace has a company set. Job title, department, company and time zone all come from a person’s profile in People, so filling those in makes this page more useful for everybody.
Guests, meaning an outside accountant, a client or a contractor, appear in the list and cannot be called or messaged. That is deliberate, and it is shown rather than hidden so nobody wonders whether the button is broken.
Calling a colleague is built and switched off while we finish testing a real call between two people from end to end. Messaging works today. When calling arrives it runs over the internet between two browsers, so it needs no phone number and costs nothing per minute.
Workspace owners can control who may contact whom, group by group and separately for messages and calls, from the Rules button at the top of Team Chat: the groups of people, the allow and deny rules between them, whether availability is read from the calendar, and whether members may clear their own call history. Every call and every message is recorded: who, whom, when and how long. Refused attempts are recorded too, so you can check a rule is doing what you meant. The words inside a private message stay private unless an owner switches auditing on, which tells everyone in the workspace and records each time anybody reads a conversation. The Calls tab is each person's own history of calls with colleagues; "Clear my history" hides it from you and deletes nothing, and an owner or admin can delete every colleague-call record in the workspace, which is written to the audit trail.