Channels, chat & notifications

Learning outcomes:

• What is channels, chat and notifications
• How to use the channels
• How to create a channel
• How to edit a channel
• @ mentions

What are you chatting about..?

Channels in Waymaker are what supports collaboration. Its where you can chat about your goals with your manager and collaborators. Its where you can keep a project team and stakeholders up to date, send meeting agendas, reminders or just say hello. And they keep all your chats in context.

When your organisation signed up to Waymaker, a channel was created. Every member of the team is a member of the organisation's channel. It's a great channel to post messages and announcements that concern the whole team. Each time a new diagnostic or goal is created, we set up a channel for them too. And then there's Custom channels, these are created manually by anyone in your team and they can invite anyone to be a member, cool huh?

And, our clever little Channels component sends an update every time a goal, outcome or task is updated making it easy to keep up to date on your teams' progress, or any goals you are collaborating on.

To launch the channels component, hit the message button at the top of the page. If the message button is blue, this indicates you have unread messages or notifications. If this is the case, when the channels component opens, it will display the list of unread messages and notifications. Notifications have a pink background to help you differentiate between notifications and messages.

If you click on an unread message or notification the channel it relates to will open... unless its a notification about a diagnostic. If the notification is about a new diagnostic, clicking the notification will launch the diagnostic. If its about an update to a diagnostic, you will be shot off in a cannon to the Organisation page of the diagnostic module.

If you have no unread messages or notifications, the channels component will open to display your 5 most recently visited channels and all the channels you are a member of. Channels are segmented by the type of channel. For each goal created on the platform, a channel is created. A channel is also created for each diagnostic. And then there are custom channels that are set up for teams, projects teams, or just for a group chat.

View a channel and send a message

The number next to a channel's name represents the number of unread messages there are for the user in that channel. Click on the name of a channel to open the channel and view and send messages.

To post a message, type your message in the input and click the post button. To comment on a message, click "Comment" beneath the message, type your comment and click the send button. Comments will be indented beneath the message they relate to.

Create a custom channel

To create a custom channel, click the Add Channel button at the top of the Channels component. Add the channel name, description, and members. All members will be notified that they are members of the new channel you created.

To add members to the channel, start typing the person's name in the search field, when you see it, click on it to select the person, then click the add user button. Repeat this process to add more members to the channel.

Edit a channel

To edit a channel, open the channel and click the edit button. Make the necessary changes and click save. All members of the channel will be notified that you made the update. 

@ mentions

You can @mention anyone in your team to notify them of a message or to bring them into a channel by typing @ then their name and clicking on their name when it appears. 

When you @mention someone who is not already a member of the channel you will be asked if you want to add the person to the channel or not. If you add them to the channel (check the checkbox next to their name), they will be notified and will be able to view and send messages on the channel. If you choose not to add them (x out of the pop-up), they will see the message in their unread messages but will not be able to access the channel.

Now you know what Channels is all about... but don't just take our word for it, go take her for a spin yourself.