Communicating with your team members and others on a transaction is critical to keeping the transaction moving forward. As a portal user, you can send a message to your team members and others from the transaction and reply to any messages sent to you. Let's go over how this works.
Notifications
To see if you have any unread messages, go to your Open To Close portal and find the @ symbol in the header of your Dashboard. If there is a red bubble with a number, you have an unread message.
Clicking on the @ symbol will open your Messages to view any new, read, sent, pinned, or archived. This article reviews those tabs in more detail: Understanding the Messaging Feature.
Sending a New Message
You can start a new message from within the transaction by selecting the address the message is about and clicking on @ New Message.
A new side panel will open to the left where you will be able to go over the review of the different sections and enter a message. Here is what each section represents.
Address - There is no way to adjust this since it is being sent from a specific property.
Property - This will likely be the same as the Address, but your TC might be naming your properties something different instead of the address.
Send To - If you are sending a new message, you will only be allowed to send it to the TC or any other team member who is part of the transaction. You do not have a way to send a message to other contacts on the transaction. If you are sending a reply, you can choose to send it to any of the collaborators who were on the message you received.
If you accidentally clicked on the wrong name when selecting who to send the message to, you can click on their name again from the drop-down to remove them.
Subject - Enter a brief description regarding what the message is about in the subject line. If you prefer to leave it blank, the system automatically fills it in with Open To Close New Message | Address.
Message - Enter the message you want to send to the collaborator(s). You also have the option to bold any part of the message or add emojis.
Upload Files - You can upload any file(s) that relate to the message.
Send Message - Look over everything you've entered before sending the message.
Sending a Message From the Different Sections of Your Transaction
You can also go to any transaction in your portal to see additional options for sending messages. You may not have all of these options depending on your portal access level.
Timeline - This shows the specific dates for the milestones in your transaction. You can click on the @ symbol in front of the specific date you want to send a message about.
Details - You can select a specific detail in the transaction and send a message regarding it. Just like the Timeline, there will be an @ symbol in front of each detail.
Documents - Each folder of documents will have its own section with the file name(s) in the folder. Before each file name is the @ symbol so you can send a message regarding that specific document.
Contacts - If you need to send a message regarding one of your contacts, you can click on the @ symbol in front of their name. This is not sending the message to that contact, only referencing the contact in the message.
Tasks - The @ symbol will be in front of each task so you can start a message for any of them. If you're not seeing the task you need, be sure to look over all of the tasks including the Unscheduled Tasks and Completed Tasks sections.
Emails - There is no way to send messages from Emails at this time.
Notes - There is no way to send messages from Notes at this time.
Messages - This takes you to your Messages board where you can see the same options as when you click the @ symbol in the header of your Dashboard.