A Guide to WorkBook Conversations

By Mark S. McNulty, Chief Financial Officer, Taft Communications, LLC

Taft Communications is a specialty consulting firm that helps businesses and nonprofits understand and harness the strength of their purpose and use its power to benefit all stakeholders — from the public, to internal teams, to the earth itself. At Taft, WorkBook conversations are vital to team sharing. We stress that all job-related messages be recorded in WorkBook instead of via emails, chats, texts, etc. With a consolidated repository of messages in one location, all team members have visibility to the history of important dialogue as well as up-to-date information to guide current activities. It avoids our prior endless searches for “who said what to whom.” Centralized documentation via conversations saves us time and streamlines activities.

Learn how to quickly and easily take advantage of WorkBook's built-in collaboration features with our guide to Conversations below.

A Conversation is a WorkBook message thread consisting of one or more Comments addressed to one or more recipients. Conversations can include internal resources (i.e. WorkBook users) and external parties (i.e. client contacts), although external parties are only notified if the customer portal option is configured. A Comment is an individual message within a Conversation.

There are many different categories of Conversations, including: General, One-on-One, Job, Task, Description, PQ, PO, Invoice, Document List, etc.

To start a new General Conversation, click the Add Entry icon in the top right corner of your workspace.

To start a Job or Task Conversation, click on the Conversation tab within the Job Card or Task Card.

Conversations/Comments are automatically sent via an Inbox notification to the resources addressed via @[initials], and are viewable by the other resources subscribed to the Conversation. 

Note that by tagging someone with @[initials] does not make your Comment private to just that person. It simply triggers the system to send them an Inbox notification that they have been mentioned in your Comment. To limit access of any Comment to a single person, you would need to start a 1:1 Conversation as described below.

The only exception about Inbox notifications is if an addressed resource “unsubscribes” to a Conversation after it is created. In this case, any future Comments within that Conversation will not be sent to the unsubscribed resource.

Generally speaking, an Open Conversation can be viewed by anyone in WorkBook.

Generally speaking, a Private Conversation can only be viewed by those to whom it is addressed.

Open Conversation (within a Job or Task)

• Viewable by everyone with access to the job or task subject to the following:
• If sent via the Publish button, these Open Conversations are viewable by everyone (internal and external resources) with access to the job or task.
• However, if sent via the Private button, only internal resources with access to the job or task will be able to view the Open Conversation.
• When new resources are added to the job or task, they will then gain access to the entire history of the Conversation. New internal resources will see all Comments, whereas new external resources will only see the history of Comments that were Published. 

Private Conversation (within a Job or Task)

• Private Conversations are not viewable by the entire job team; they are only viewable by the addressed resources subject to the following:
• If sent via the Publish button, these Private Conversations are sent to (and viewable by) every addressed internal and external resource.
• However, if sent via the Private button, these Private Conversations are sent to (and viewable by) addressed internal resources only.

Open Conversation (not within a Job or Task)

• Viewable by everyone in WorkBook subject to the following:
• If sent via the Publish button, these Open Conversations are viewable by everyone (internal and external resources).
• However, if sent via the Private button, only internal resources will be able to view the Open Conversation.
• When new resources are added to the job or task, they will then gain access to the entire history of the Conversation. New internal resources will see all Comments, whereas new external resources will only see the history of Comments that were Published. 

Private Conversation (not within a Job or Task)

• These Private Conversations are only viewable by the addressed resources subject to the following:
• If sent via the Publish button, these Private Conversations are sent to (and viewable by) every addressed internal and external resource.
• However, if sent via the Private button, these Private Conversations are sent to (and viewable by) addressed internal resources only.

One-on-One Conversation

• There are only 2 parties involved in the Conversation: the sender and the recipient. This category of message cannot be viewed by any other parties.

Sending a Comment

• Publish button: Means the Conversation will be sent to both internal and external parties.
• Private button: Means the Conversation will be sent to internal parties only.

You can ensure that you don’t accidentally publish any comments by mistake by adjusting your user settings to check the box to “Raise warning when sending a public comment” and/or “Send private comments by default.”