Messaging and your work inbox¶
HiveComms brings work conversations and the items that need your attention into WorkOS. The inbox helps you find relevant work; direct messages, channels and workstreams provide places to communicate about it. A workstream connects a conversation to a business process, such as a request. Your work mailbox is a separate connection to your email service.
Availability: These draft guides cover the intended inbox, conversation, membership, message, file, search and workflow workstream journeys, plus linked channel updates, workflow comments, work/meeting notifications, verified responses and evidence recovery. Their implementation limits are explained alongside the steps. The current app preview still uses sample conversations, forms and navigation; these pages do not establish that Messaging is connected or deployed in your workspace. Complete event producers and projection families, live delivery, storage and access verification, and the remaining service behavior are still being reconciled.
Use Review your work inbox for attention and state changes, and Start conversations and manage people for direct/group/channel creation, adding people, creator-only removal, leaving and uncertain-result recovery.
Use the message and file guide for sending, opening files, receipt meaning, history limits and recovery. Use Search HiveComms to find conversations and work summaries, with clear limits on older-message matching, counts and where a result opens.
Use Understand meeting updates to separate personal summaries, inbox attention, participant changes and the meeting's current state.
Use Understand verified work responses and recognition to distinguish a useful message, verified contribution evidence, corrections and recognition alerts.
Use When contribution evidence is delayed or missing to understand reconciliation, retained evidence and the information support needs to investigate a discrepancy.
Use Messaging data, exports and organization removal to understand included records, separately stored files, contribution history and the difference between a service result and organization-wide completion.
Use Use the assistant with Messaging to understand bounded answers, supported reviewed changes, saved action results and recovery without duplicating a change.
Use Choose your email updates to control optional group-membership emails. That account-wide choice does not mute every conversation or remove inbox work. The notification overview explains email, inbox, live updates and disabled SMS/device push.
Choose the right place¶
Use Follow work in a workstream to find eligible work, open its official updates or discussions, understand task-linked audience restrictions and check whether creation returned an existing conversation.
Use Understand linked updates in a channel to interpret source-work updates, retained history when a relationship changes and missing-update recovery.
Use Understand comments and work updates to distinguish discussion comments, personal notifications and the underlying work; understand repeated or reactivated items; and recover when an update is missing or stale.
| Place | What it helps you do |
|---|---|
| Inbox | Review items addressed to you, with Work, Mentions and Alerts lanes. An item can point to the business record where you continue. |
| Direct messages | Find conversations with people. The underlying conversation list can contain both one-to-one and group conversations; the label alone does not establish the audience. |
| Channels | Follow a shared conversation space when your access permits it. Channel participation and access still matter. |
| Workstreams | Follow conversations and official updates connected to work. Access to an inbox entry is not a guarantee of access to the linked workstream. |
| Meetings | Continue to the meeting area. An inbox item about a meeting does not establish admission to it. |
| Mailbox | Connect and use your own work email through the separate mailbox feature. |
The inbox is personal to the current user in the current workspace. It is not a manager's complete team queue, an organization-wide activity report or an email inbox. A manager or executive title does not automatically grant access to somebody else's entries or conversations.
Understand an item's state¶
Read state and resolution answer different questions:
| State | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Read | The inbox entry has a recorded read time. This does not prove that its business task was completed. |
| Unread | The entry has no recorded read time. Marking it unread does not reopen a resolved entry. |
| Active | The inbox entry remains active. It can already be read. |
| Resolved | The inbox entry has been resolved. This is separate from approving a request, completing a workflow or sending a message. |
| Reopened | A previously resolved entry has become active again. Its read state is preserved. |
A later occurrence can update an entry and make it active again while preserving its read state. The displayed time may therefore describe a later occurrence or state change, rather than when the original business request was created. Use the underlying record for its actual lifecycle and decision history.
The backend supports personal read/unread and resolve/reopen changes. The inspected final inbox screen does not yet establish the exact controls and recovery companions for those changes. This guide explains their meaning without inventing button locations or promising that opening a row marks it read.
Counts are attention signals¶
An inbox lane's unread count includes active entries without a recorded read time. A resolved entry can still be displayed, but it is excluded from that active-unread count. The visible list is a limited preview, and its count is not the size of the complete inbox.
Conversation badges are separate from inbox-lane counts. They can describe unread conversations or unread messages. Do not add those values together and call the result a number of people, tasks or unique business events. A message, a work item and an unread conversation are different units.
Conversation badges currently use a shared read-completion flag. A message can still count after you have read it because another participant has not. Some automatic updates are also counted differently in the badge and the conversation list. These badges are not a precise count of messages you personally have not read.
Counts and lists are gathered separately and can briefly disagree while activity changes. Selecting a particular lane can help focus the preview; a short or empty preview alone does not prove there is no older work. There is no verified load-more journey in this first documentation scope.
Conversation lists also depend on active participation and current access. An access check can shorten the returned page without adjusting its displayed total. Treat that total cautiously when investigating missing conversations. Workstream conversation rows can represent several discussions attached to the same request; their number is not a count of unique requests or completed work.
Access and responsibility¶
Read Understand Messaging access and people updates for the separate membership, product, conversation and source-work checks; delayed or out-of-order access changes; stale profile details; and support recovery.
Current capability rules require active workspace membership, base WorkOS access and basic HiveComms access for one-to-one messaging and official workstream updates. Advanced access additionally enables group messaging, channels and workstream discussions. A capability summary is not a substitute for the access check on a particular conversation or work item.
The current limited-access design says official updates remain available while basic messaging is unavailable. That statement needs reconciliation with the implementation. Until it is resolved, do not assume a shared request grants continuing HiveComms access. Ask your administrator to check membership, product access and the specific shared item.
Members review the right workspace, follow the original work reference and distinguish reading from completing work. Managers should use the owning workflow or case for assignment and completion decisions. Administrators help reconcile access changes. Support should investigate missing or unclear results through authorized channels rather than ask users to expose private message contents.
For business planning, the inbox offers a way to bring attention to work in context. These draft pages do not claim measured productivity gains, guaranteed delivery, complete task coverage or a service-level commitment. Assess the connected experience and the relevant operational controls before depending on it for time-critical work.