Organization chat

Openbook does not hold your organization's chat. Channels, direct messages, attachments and reactions all live in the Bookbag account service, the same place that holds your sign-in, your organizations and your files. Openbook shows them.

That is the whole point of it: the same organization has one conversation, whichever product you are in. A message sent from the bubble in Openbook is in the thread a colleague is reading in Madebook, and the unread badge is the same badge. Three windows, one room.

This is not the same thing as an Openbook chat room. They look alike and are different underneath — the difference is set out at the bottom of this page, and it is worth reading before you pick one.

The two ways in

Both show the same conversations.

• The bubble. A blue circle in the bottom-right corner of every page in Openbook. It carries an unread count, and clicking it opens the panel over whatever you were looking at. On a phone it steps out of the way on pages that have their own message box — the chat page itself and any room — because covering the composer you are typing in is worse than offering a shortcut to the page you are already on.
• The page. Pick your organization in the sidebar and open Chat, between Members & access and Files.

Organization chat Everyone in this organization. The same conversations appear in every Bookbag product.

Channels and direct messages

Two kinds of conversation, and the panel lists both together, most recent first.

• Channels are open to the organization. Everyone can see that a channel exists and can read it; posting to one joins you to it.
• Direct messages are between the people in them. A DM you are not in is not listed and cannot be opened. Starting a DM with a set of people who already have one reopens that conversation rather than creating a second — so two people never end up with two threads and half the history in each.

Start either from New message: search the people list, optionally give it a channel name, and press Create channel or Start chat.

Everyone in the organization is in the people list, including anyone invited by email who has not signed in yet — they are marked pending, and become reachable when they register.

What a message can carry

• Text, edited afterwards by its author and no one else, which marks it edited.
• Mentions, typed with @. A mention raises a notification for that person in every product's bell, not only in Openbook. Mentioned names are checked against the organization's roster, so a mention cannot reach someone outside it.
• Reactions, which toggle — clicking the emoji you already added takes it away. Hovering a reaction shows who added it.
• Attachments — see below.
• Pins. Any member of a conversation can pin a message and any member can unpin it; pinned messages are listed newest first.

You can search within a conversation, which is a case-insensitive match on the message text.

Deleting a message is the author's to do. It removes the message, its reactions and its attachment rows for everyone.

There is also a video call per conversation: start one from the call button in the thread header and other members can join it.

Who can see a conversation

Membership of the organization is what grants access. There is no separate chat permission and no list to maintain — if someone is in the organization at your Bookbag account, they can open chat for it; if they are not, they cannot.

Three consequences worth knowing:

• Removing someone from the organization ends their chat access immediately, not when something expires. Membership is re-checked on every call, not once at sign-in.
• A conversation in another organization simply does not exist for you. It is reported as not found rather than as forbidden, because "not yours" and "not there" are the same answer and the difference only helps someone guessing at ids.
• If you cannot chat here, you see no chat. When access is refused the bubble does not render at all — not a disabled button, not an error. A chat button that cannot chat is a worse answer than no button. On the full page you get a plain card instead: Chat is not available here.

Your role in the organization — owner, admin, member or viewer — does not change what you can do in chat. Everyone who is in it can read, post, attach and react.

The Chat access setting on Members & access does not govern this. That setting — Everyone, or selected members — restricts Openbook's own chat rooms. Organization chat is governed by organization membership at the account service, which Openbook does not filter. See Members & access.

Where attachments go

Attach files with the paperclip in the composer. Images, documents, anything.

Chat attachments are ordinary files in your organization's storage. They go to the same place every other byte goes, are counted against the same allowance, appear in the organization's Files list tagged Chat, and are charged to the organization owner's Bookbag account like everything else. Storage and files describes that allowance in full, and it is worth reading, because chat is one of the easiest ways to fill it.

Two refusals, both in the composer as a plain sentence:

That file is too large (25.4MB; the limit is 20MB).

Storage limit reached. Point this organization at its own storage provider, or ask a platform admin for a higher limit.

The fixes are the ones on the storage page: delete files, point the organization at its own S3 bucket, Dropbox or SharePoint, or ask a platform admin to raise the number.

Deleting a message does not delete its files. The message goes; the bytes stay in the organization's file list and keep counting against the allowance. To reclaim the room, delete the file from the Files page as well.

Attachments are readable only through chat, by people who can read the message they hang off. The file itself is not public and the link in a message is not a permanent address — it carries a short-lived credential, so a link copied out of the page stops working shortly afterwards. Open the file from the message rather than saving its URL.

How it stays in sync

Messages, typing indicators, presence and calls arrive over a live connection to the account service — the browser talks to it directly rather than through Openbook. That connection is authorized by a short-lived token that Openbook's server mints for you, good for about fifteen minutes and renewed quietly in the background.

You will not usually notice any of this. The one visible symptom is a panel that reconnects after a laptop has been asleep, which is the token being replaced.

How this differs from a chat room

Openbook also has a chat room type, which puts channels and DMs inside a space alongside its boards and docs. It is built on the same idea and is a genuinely different thing. Neither replaces the other, and messages never cross between them.

	Organization chat (this page)	A chat room
Scope	One organization. One set of conversations.	One room, inside one space. Each chat room owns its own conversations.
Where you find it	The bubble on every page, and Organization → Chat	Inside the space, like any other room
Who can see it	Anyone in the organization	Anyone who can see that room, and who passes the organization's Chat access setting
Where the messages live	Your Bookbag account, shared with Madebook and Bookbag	Openbook's own database — Openbook only
Visible in other products	Yes	No
Attachments	The organization's storage allowance	The organization's storage allowance
Free-plan history limit	None	Messages older than 30 days are hidden until you upgrade
Good for	The company. Anything that is not about one project.	A team working in one space, where the conversation belongs next to the boards it is about

The practical rule: if the conversation is about the organization, use organization chat; if it is about one space's work, a chat room in that space keeps it next to the work. A reader who sees "Chat" twice in the sidebar is seeing both — the organization's, and whichever rooms a space has.

Where to go next

• The room type, in full: Chat
• The allowance attachments are charged to: Storage and files
• Who is in the organization, and how that is changed: Members & access
• Where mentions turn up: Notifications