Teams and front doors¶
A team is a group of colleagues that belongs together.
That is the whole idea, and for most teams it is the whole story. You might have a finance team, a support team, a team for one client. Grouping them makes them easier to find, easier to talk about, and easier to give work to as a unit.
Some teams do more than that. If a team needs to be reachable by people outside your organisation — customers, families, members of the public — it gets a front door. That changes what a team is in a few important ways, and it is opt-in: a team is a plain grouping until you decide otherwise.
Why you would want a team¶
To organise colleagues. Five colleagues doing finance work are easier to manage as "Finance" than as five separate hires.
To give work to a group rather than a person. A job can belong to a team, and any colleague in it can carry it out. Nobody is a single point of failure, and you are not re-teaching the same job to each new hire.
To share what the team knows. A team has a knowledge wall — the documents and answers its colleagues draw on. Add something once and everyone in the team has it.
To let people outside reach them. This is the front door, below.
If none of those apply, you do not need a team. A colleague works perfectly well on their own.
Creating a team¶
- Go to Teams and choose New team.
- Give it a name people would actually say out loud — "Support", not "SUP-01".
- Add colleagues. You can add more later, and a colleague can be in more than one team.
- Stop there, unless people outside your organisation need to reach it.
Front doors¶
A front door is how someone outside your organisation gets to a team. Without one, a team is internal: your people talk to it, nobody else can.
There are several kinds, and a team can have more than one:
| Kind | What it is |
|---|---|
| Web | A page people can visit and start a conversation on. |
| Embed | A widget you drop into your own site or app. |
| SDK | Your own application talks to the team over the partner API. |
| The team has an address people can write to. | |
| Chat | Teams or Slack, for organisations that use them. |
Opening a front door is a real decision, not a setting. It means people who are not in your organisation will be talking to your colleagues, so a team with a front door also gets:
- An address book — a record of who has been in touch, so a returning person is recognised rather than met as a stranger every time.
- Duty-of-care routing — rules for what happens when someone new arrives, and when someone comes back.
- Overseers — where a participant is someone you have a responsibility to (a child, a vulnerable adult), an overseer is the person who needs to know when something happens. See when alerts do not arrive.
Who can be reached, and what they can use¶
A front door does not open everything. Two things stay under your control:
- Which jobs are offered externally. A job is internal unless you say otherwise, and offering one externally is per-job.
- How much any one person can use. Quotas are set per team, so a single visitor cannot consume the team's whole allowance.
Connection status¶
A front door reports where it has got to:
- Building — set up, not yet accepting anything.
- Listening — accepting connections, nothing has arrived yet.
- Live — in use.
Live describes the door, not the traffic
A door can read live while nothing is actually getting through it — the door is configured correctly and the thing on the other end is refusing what we send. The deliveries line on the door tells you what is really happening. If it says alerts are not arriving, see when alerts do not arrive.
Where to go next¶
- Jobs — the work a team can do, and offering it externally.
- Partner API — building your own front door.
- Webhooks — receiving events from a team.