Site Messages
A site message is a short broadcast to the people on a job: a crane lift closing an access road tomorrow, a change to the induction time, a severe weather warning, an evacuation. It is one-way and it is deliberately not a conversation. Where you want a reply on the record, use Mail.
What makes it useful is that a message can reach people who never open Teralo, because it can be delivered at the gate.
How a message is delivered
The distribution method is the first choice on the form and it changes what the rest of the form asks for.
Website puts the message on the project dashboard. No recipient list, because everyone on the project sees it.
Email sends it to the recipients you choose.
SMS texts them. The form counts characters and segments as you type and shows the total number of messages that will be sent, which is worth watching.
Sign-in / Sign-out presents the message at the gate, so a worker sees it and acknowledges it as they sign on or off. This is the one that reaches the people without accounts. See Inductions.
All Methods does all four.
Recipients
Email, SMS and All Methods take a recipient list. You can pick individual people, pick a distribution group, or tick Include currently signed-in workers, which addresses the message to whoever is on site at the moment you send it.
That last option is the one to reach for in an emergency, because it needs no list to be maintained and no list to be right.
Emergency messages
Choosing SMS puts an Emergency / evacuation checkbox on the form, which bypasses the monthly SMS fair use limit.
It exists so a genuine emergency is never blocked by a quota, and for exactly that reason it should be used only for one. A project that ticks it for schedule updates has spent the thing it will want on the day it matters.
Writing and scheduling
Title and Content are what you would expect, with a rich text editor for everything except SMS. Where a rich text message is also going out by SMS, the form shows the plain text version it will send, so you can see what is lost.
Two optional controls sit at the bottom. Schedule sets a publish date and time, so the message about Monday's road closure can be written on Friday. Set Expiry gives it an end date, so a notice about this week stops being shown next week.
Attachments are added after the message is saved, and not at all on an SMS.
Who got it
Open a published message and it shows its recipients with a delivery status against each: pending, sent or failed. Email and SMS delivery is what that tracks.
Messages distributed at sign-in and sign-out record something stronger: an acknowledgement against the worker, with the time and whether it was on the way in or the way out. That is the record you would want if anybody ever asked whether a particular warning had been passed on.
Both are included when a message is exported as a PDF, which is the tidy way to file one against an incident or a claim.
The register
Site Messages opens on a register showing the message number, title, distribution method, status, when it was published and who created it.
A published message can be edited, and messages that have served their purpose are archived rather than deleted, so the record of what was broadcast survives the tidy-up.
SettingsHost only
Site Messages has no Tools settings page of its own. There is nothing to configure: the distribution methods are fixed, and the only thing a message draws on from elsewhere is the distribution groups set up in the Directory.
Two things worth knowing anyway. SMS delivery is subject to a monthly fair use limit on your plan, so see Plans and entitlements. And whether sign-in and sign-out are running at all is a project induction setting rather than a site messages one.
PermissionsHost only
Four permissions. Viewing site messages is the ordinary one and should be broad, since a message nobody can read is not a broadcast.
Creating and publishing is one permission, and it is the one to be careful with, because publishing an SMS to everyone on site spends real money and everybody's attention. Managing and archiving is separate, and deleting is separate again.
See How permissions work.