Conversations – PPO Support Portal

Conversations functionality in PPO allows you the ability to have informal discussions, tag in users and share knowledge and content on any entity (risks, issues, projects, documents and even approvals).

To support the conversations functionality there is also a Feed that alerts users when they have either been tagged in a conversation, received a reply to a conversation, or if related to the item (Example: If you are the Issue Owner or Contact Person on an Issue where a conversation was added).

How to activate conversations

Hover over Administration and select System Configuration. Under "Other Settings" there is a section that allows you to enable/disable the entities where you want to use Conversations. By default, the below entities have Conversations enabled.

Once activated, you will notice a pane on the right hand side of an item on the View page.

Adding a conversation

To add a conversation to an item, you simply click on New Conversation.

You can add a Subject and type the detail of your conversation in the box provided. Once done, click Submit.

There can be various conversations on a single item in PPO. The latest conversation on an item will always show at the top of the pane.

When adding or replying to a conversation, you cannot reply to another conversation on the same item. You first need to Submit or Cancel one of them to reply to another.

Adding images

To add an image to a conversation, you can either click on the icon on the right-hand side of the submit and cancel buttons, drag and drop your image into the box or copy an image and paste it into the conversation box.

Note that the maximum image size allowed is 1MB.

Adding documents

To add a document to a conversation, you can either click on the paperclip icon on the right-hand side of the submit and cancel buttons, drag and drop your document into the box or copy and paste it into the conversation box.

The file size limit is 50MB, the same as with PPO documents.
After submitting the conversation with files, the files can be downloaded by just clicking on the hyperlink.

Tagging users

You are able to tag users in conversations. By doing so, users will get a notification alert in their feed. To tag a user you simply type @followed by their name as per the example screenshot below. All active employees can be tagged, but only users will see the notification alert in their feed. More information related to the feed is in the next section.

Feed

The feed icon can be found on the top right-hand side of the Main Menu next to the Search button. In the screenshot below you can see that the user has 2 unread feed items.

Users are also able to see the number of unread items on the page title (tab caption at the top of the browser). You will also hear an alert sound when you get a new feed item, below is a screenshot of how the tab caption will look if there are unread feed items.

In addition to the above, an e-mail notification will be sent once a week on a Thursday at 11h45 (GMT+02h00) if you have feed items that have not been read that are older than 2 days. Each user can decide under their preferences whether or not to receive these e-mails.

Feed items are only created for employees with an active user account. If a new conversation is added, all employees related to the entity record will get a feed item for the new conversation (employee type fields on the specific entity are taken into account whether they are hidden fields or not).

When clicking on the Feed icon, the feed will open up as shown below. Here you can see all 3 items have not been read yet, as they are still highlighted.

If a user clicks a feed item, they will be redirected to the entity view page where the relevant conversation took place.

The conversation item will then be highlighted in the conversation chain.

Once you have clicked on the feed item we see it as 'read' and will display it as per below.

If there are multiple feed items related to the same conversation chain, if any one of the feed items is clicked, all of them will be flagged as read. This is to prevent users from having to click every feed item to flag it as read even though they all link to the same chain.

To mark a feed item as unread, simply click on the envelope on the right side of the feed notification.

You also have the ability to Dismiss All feed items which will remove all items in the feed. The 'x' on the feed is just used to close the feed.

Note that if the conversation that relates to the feed item has already been deleted by the time the user clicks on the feed item, then a callout at the top of the conversation widget will notify the user that the item has been deleted.

Replying to conversations

Replies to conversations are ordered from oldest to newest so that the conversation can be read in an order that makes sense.

To reply to a conversation you simply click on the Reply button and click Submit.

When a user replies to a conversation, all the users related to the conversation chain get feed items for the reply (the user that posted the original conversation, all the users that posted any reply to the conversation chain, and all users that were tagged in the conversation chain).

When hovering over an existing conversation, you will notice the reactions pop up.

You can also use additional Emojis in conversations as most operating systems have built-in support for Emojis. For a Window OS: Press and hold the Windows key and a "full stop" - the emoji box will appear.

For Mac OS: Click on hold Control and Command and Space.

Editing conversations

You have the ability to edit your own conversations using the pencil on the right-hand side. By doing so you will notice it shows as 'Edited'.

Deleting conversations

You have the ability to delete a conversation that you started or delete an update within a conversation that you made using the delete button as shown below:

You cannot delete a conversation that someone else started. When deleting a conversation you will see the following pop-up asking to confirm whether you are sure you want to delete it.

Search

You have the ability to search for a specific word in a conversation. Clicking on the Search icon, a search box will appear. In the example below we searched for Cost. The word is then highlighted in the conversation.

Note that while adding or editing any conversation, the search functionality is not available. While searching, you also can't add a new conversation. You can however reply to one of the search results or edit it if it is your own conversation post.

When searching, the feed item will automatically expand and show all relevant replies and will also expand long conversations so that all the text is visible.

Additional information

When adding or replying to a conversation, the related item will automatically be shown on your timesheet when applying the "Items I updated this week" filter under Options.
If employees are tagged that don't have a user account they won't receive any form of notification or email.
If a conversation has more than 3 new lines OR the length of the text for the conversation exceeds 200, then there will be a ‘See more’/’See less’ toggle.
When the widget loads initially, all long conversations with ‘See more’/’See less’ toggles will be collapsed/minimized. The user will have to explicitly click ‘See more’ if they want to see the entire conversation.
When the feed loads initially, all replies for all conversations will be hidden and the user will have to click ‘Show replies’ if they want to see a conversation’s replies.
Each conversation post has a timestamp. The timestamp will be a friendly date like ‘a minute ago’ or ‘2 days ago’ etc. When the timestamp is more than 7 days ago, it will instead show the actual date without a time part.
The height of the conversation widget will grow until it reaches the height of the entity view/edit section and then it will have a scrollbar.
For medium and small-sized browser windows (this is classified by the available width of the window and small would-be cellphone-sized and medium would be iPad sized) the conversation widget will move to below the entity view/edit section and will no longer be next to it.
Feed items only exist for 30 days. After 30 days they expire and get deleted automatically.
We only show the first 100 feed items, if there are more then you must click to retrieve more.
When pasting or dropping files, we check to see if the files are images of less than 1MB and then add the image to the content. If the files are not images or they are images of larger than 1MB then we attach the files as attachments.
We do not limit how many files the user can attach to a single conversation, as it would serve no purpose when the user can just add unlimited number of conversations.