Chat rooms are the perfect place to hold discussions around projects, clients, what’s going on in the office and even larger tasks. You have the option to make rooms open to your whole organization or invite only, if the material you’ll be discussing is a little more sensitive. To get started click the + icon next to “Chat Rooms” at the top of the chat sidebar.

This will open a pane that contains all the rooms that have created (if any). To create a new room here, click the green “Create new” button to get started.

Now, give your room a name. Something descriptive about what you’ll be discussing can be helpful, like Design, Marketing, Admin, HR, etc., but you can also set up rooms that coincide with your project names if you want to only discuss a particular project in a room. If you want everyone in your organization to see the room, click “Create” and it will be added to your sidebar. Any user can then join the chat room, which you can learn about here.

Creating Private Rooms

If you’ve decided to make the room invite-only, you’ll toggle on the button next to “Make chat private.” When you do you’ll see a yellow note appear confirming that the chat will be private, so only invited users will be able to see it. When you’re ready to create the private room, click “Create.”

The next step will ask you to invite your teammates to your private room. If they’re a member of your organization their name should appear in the dropdown as a suggested result. You can also enter the email address of another user who isn’t already a member of your Flow organization; doing so will add them to your organization and give them access to chat, but will not give them access to any teams.

When you’ve added the teammates you want to share the room with click “Add people to this chat.” Don’t worry—if you forgot anyone, you can add them anytime from the room.

Once the invites are sent you’ll see a little confirmation message. Click “Ok!” to jump into your new chat room.

Click the white space next to the room name and you’ll see a small “Set Topic” field appear. Simply type the topic of conversation for your room and click outside the box to save.

Whether the room is private or public you can add a “topic” for the room, which can act as a description of what you’ll be discussing. You can edit the topic anytime by clicking into the field and entering something new.