D-Tools Cloud offers real-time Chat for communication with your team members. Chats are helpful when you want to provide quick guidance to Installers or solve issues they face on-site. Office users can use Chats to avoid the hassle of communicating over email.

Chat is built into the Web app. You must be logged in as an Office user or Field user to use the Chat feature.

To access the Chat feature, click the "Chat icon" at the top-right corner.

The Chat is automatically active when you are logged into the Cloud app. When you are not logged into the Cloud, the inbound messages are stored, and you can see them when you log in.

The Message Editor provides a rich messaging experience with support for file and multimedia Attachments, static Geolocation Sharing, Reactions, and a wide range of Emojis.

Group chats allow one-to-many messaging. Group chat is helpful when you want to assemble multiple Installers or Project stakeholders across different teams in one Chat conversation.

There is no upper limit to the number of Groups you can create or the number of users you can add to a Group.

Creating a group automatically makes you the sole Administrator of the group. You can always add more users when you want to include them in the chat.

To create a group, click the “Plus icon” and then click Add group, add a name for the group, add relevant users, and click Create group.

When certain groups are inactive or unnecessary, you can delete them and retain only the relevant groups. You can also rename a Group to broaden its scope and purpose.

Potentially, every new chat message in a Chat is a Conversation thread. You can always reply to a specific thread to create a Conversation flow and collectively see the messages, responses, and reactions in the thread.

Conversation threading is helpful when discussing different topics in a one-on-one or Group chat.

Optionally, you can enable notifications to appear on your computer when the Web browser is minimized or not in your active view. Notifications are browser-specific, so you must be logged in from the browser you usually use for D-Tools Cloud.

Click the Settings wheel in the Chat app and set the "Desktop Notifications" switch to ON (turns Green).

After Desktop Notifications are enabled, you should see the D-Tools Cloud website in the allowed sites to send notifications. The following image shows how this looks on Google Chrome.

Chat conversations can be copied from the app to a text editor or email. This is helpful when you want to send conversations to Project stakeholders via email or save them offline for recordkeeping purposes.

The history of a conversation is retained for six months. You cannot disable the retention or change the duration.

After six months, the older chat messages in the conversations are automatically deleted.