Messages between colleagues

Your company's people write to each other inside NDT Intact, as they work: one conversation per pair, and groups for a job, a site or a crew, with text, pictures and documents. Messages arrive as they are sent, and an email tells someone away from the app that messages are waiting. Only the people in a conversation read it, and nothing reaches a client or another company.

Where messages are

• The popup. The round button at the bottom corner of every page of the company app, Open messages, shows how many messages are unread and opens the messenger above it. On a phone it fills the screen.
• The Messages page. Messages, in the Work section of the sidebar, shows the list of conversations beside the open one, and carries the unread count. From the popup, Open messages in a full page takes you there.

Client portals have no messages: your clients write to you as they do today.

Who can write to whom

Everyone who works in the company: staff, crew members and short-term members. Each pair has one conversation, whoever starts it. A person who works for two companies has two inboxes, one in each, switched with the organisation switcher. Client users are never in a conversation, and there are no messages between companies.

When someone leaves the company, their conversations stay; the page marks them No longer with the company, and they see no new messages.

Starting a conversation

• New message: search people by name and choose one. If the two of you already have a conversation, it opens.
• New group: give it a Group name (a job, a site or a crew, for example), choose the people, then Create group.

Groups

Whoever makes a group is its admin, and can make others admins. In the group's details (Conversation details):

• Add people: a newcomer reads the whole history, as in a team channel, and starts with nothing unread.
• Remove from the group, and Make admin, beside each person.
• Rename the group.
• Leave the group, for anyone. A group is never left without an admin: when the last one leaves, the person who has been in it longest becomes one.

Each change is noted in the conversation itself, in each reader's language, such as who added whom or what the group was renamed to.

Writing, pictures and documents

Write in the box at the foot of the conversation and press Enter; Shift and Enter start a new line. A message holds up to 4,000 characters.

Attach pictures or documents adds up to ten files to one message: images, PDFs, office documents or text. You can also paste a picture into the box, or drop files onto the conversation. Pictures show in the conversation; opening or saving a file is recorded as a download. Files go straight to storage, like every file in NDT Intact.

A message is sent whether or not the live connection is up. One that could not be sent says Not sent. with Send again.

Who has read what, who is typing, who is online

Under your last message, Seen or Seen by names who has read that far. While someone writes, the conversation says so. A dot on a person's initials, and Online under their name at the top of the conversation, mean they have the app open right now.

Changing or removing your own message

From Message actions, the menu beside your own message:

• Edit changes its text; the message is then marked edited.
• Remove takes it away for everyone: its text and files go for good, and the conversation shows This message was removed. in its place. Nothing else is deleted: the conversation and who said what to whom stay whole.

You cannot edit or remove a colleague's message, and nobody, owners included, can remove a conversation.

Muting, emails and notifications

In Conversation details, opened from the top of a conversation, Mute this conversation: no notifications and no emails for it, and it leaves the unread count; it stays in your list.

Message settings, from the top of the list of conversations, is yours alone, per company:

• Email me when messages wait unread. After fifteen minutes unread, you get one email per conversation, at most once an hour, saying who wrote and how many messages are waiting, never what they say. The email's link opens the conversation. Untick it to stop these emails for this company.
• Notifications in this browser: Turn on asks the browser to show a notification when a message arrives while you are on another page or in another window. Blocked or unsupported browsers say so.

Notifications on phones come with the phone apps; until then, the email tells you.

Live, or every few seconds

Messages normally arrive the moment they are sent. If the live connection is down, the list says Live updates are off; messages are checked every few seconds, and the page asks for new messages on its own: nothing is lost, it is only slower. Sending works either way.

Who reads a conversation

Only the people in it. The company's owners and admins have no way to read a conversation they are not in, and there is no screen that shows everyone's messages. A file sent in a message is opened only from that message, by the people in the conversation, and each opening is recorded.

One exception, for the record: an owner's export of the company's data, from Settings, Data and region, includes every table the company holds, messages among them, because a company's messages are its records.