The Strata sidebar

The sidebar is one column. At the top, under your organization's name, are the places you go to: Search, New chat, Inbox, Agents, Customize, Data (while a database is connected), for admins Organization, and More, where you choose which of them to show. Below them are your chats, pinned first and the rest by day. Your account menu is at the bottom.

The places

• Search opens the search palette (see Search below). It is drawn as a field, with its shortcut, Cmd+K (Windows: Ctrl+K), at its end.
• New chat starts a new chat. Its shortcut, Shift+Cmd+O (Windows: Ctrl+Shift+O), is shown beside it and works even while you are typing in the message box. Cmd+N is left to your browser, which opens a new window with it.
• Inbox opens your inbox: announcements, agent run notifications and system messages. While you have unread messages, it shows how many. See Inbox.
• Agents opens the Agents page, where your agents are listed by state (Running, Needs attention, Scheduled, On demand, Paused) and where you create them. See Agents.
• Customize opens the Customize page: your skills, extensions and connectors. See Customize.
• Data opens the database pages: Tables, Procedures, Explorer and Schema map, as tabs under one heading, Data, each at its own address. It is shown while you have a SQL Server connection and SQL Server is allowed for you, by the same rules Strata applies when you use it: your role, widened by any role bound to one of your groups, narrowed by your organization's extension list in Ceiling mode, minus any extension an admin turned off for you.
• Organization (for admins) opens the admin pages: the organization's settings, its people, usage and billing, with their own navigation down the left of each. It is shown when your role grants admin access and at least one admin page, and it opens the first one you may see. See Admin console overview.
• More, always last, opens a menu beside it: the places you have hidden, then Edit sidebar….

The place for the page you are on is highlighted.

Edit sidebar

More › Edit sidebar… opens a dialog with a tick for each place you have: Inbox, Agents, Customize, and Data and Organization when they are yours. Untick a place to hide it; it leaves the column at once and is listed in More's menu instead, one click away (the Inbox there with its unread count). Tick it to bring it back. There is nothing to save: Done, the X or Esc closes the dialog. Search and New chat are always shown.

Your choice is kept on your account, so your sidebar is the same on every device you sign in on. If it cannot be saved, the sidebar goes back to what it was and says so.

Your chats

Your chats fill the rest of the column.

• Pinned chats come first, in their own section.
• The rest are your recent chats, up to 30 of them, grouped by day: Today, Yesterday, Previous 7 days, Previous 30 days and Older.
• Show all chats, at the end of the list, opens every chat on its own page.

The chat you are in is highlighted. Each chat row has a menu (⋯) for quick actions:

• Rename: edit the chat title
• Pin chat / Unpin chat: keep favorites at the top, in Pinned
• Export: download the conversation as a formatted PDF
• Delete: remove the chat from your history (your organization's retention policy decides how long its record is kept); deleting the chat you are in opens a new chat

Filtering the list

The filter button sits at the end of the first day's heading. It narrows the list to Pinned only, or by Date (All time, Today, Last 7 days, Last 30 days or Last 3 months) and by Model (when your chats used more than one), and sorts it by Recent activity, Date created or Title A to Z. While a filter is applied, the button is highlighted and the menu offers Clear filters. The days follow the order you choose: sorted by date created, a chat sits under the day it was created; sorted by title, the list has one Recents heading and no days.

Search (Cmd/Ctrl+K)

Press Cmd+K (Windows: Ctrl+K), or click Search at the top of the sidebar, to open the search palette. It searches your chats: every chat's title and the text of every message in it.

Before you type, the palette lists your most recent chats. Type at least two characters to search; results appear under Chats, with the matching words highlighted. A result that matched inside a conversation is labelled in messages and shows the sentence it matched.

Choosing a result opens that chat. When the match was inside a message, the chat opens scrolled to that message, which is marked for a couple of seconds so you can see which one it was. On a phone, the sidebar drawer closes as the chat opens.

Use ↑/↓ to move through results, Enter to open the highlighted one, or Esc to close. Closing it puts focus back where it was.

Note

Very old archived history is not searched. When some of your history is archived, the palette says so under the results.

Collapse and resize

The sidebar can be collapsed to an icon-only rail. Hover any icon for its name, shown beside it (your avatar shows your name). In the rail, the Inbox icon carries a red dot while you have unread messages, and its name says how many. Your chats are not listed in the rail; Search and New chat are at the top of it.

Click the collapse toggle (top-right of the sidebar, next to the organization name) to collapse or expand it. The sidebar collapses by itself when your window narrows below about 1100px.

To adjust the sidebar width, drag the vertical grip along its right edge. The width is saved per browser. The grip also works from the keyboard: focus it and press ← / → to nudge the width by 8 pixels.

The account menu

Click your name, role and avatar at the bottom of the sidebar to open your account menu. It shows:

• Your email, at the top
• Settings: opens your personal settings
• Usage: opens Settings on your usage
• Language: opens Choose your language; beside it is the language you use now, in its own name (see Language)
• Get help: opens the support assistant
• Learn more: a submenu with links to Documentation, Terms of service, Usage policy and Privacy policy
• Log out: signs you out after a confirmation dialog

The avatar is the one you pick in Settings: one of the symbols, or your initials, on a neutral disc. It is the same picture everywhere in Strata: here, in Settings, on the admin Users page, on an announcement you send, and in Strata for Outlook.

Online status

A small dot next to your avatar shows your network state:

• Green (online): connected and responsive
• Yellow (unstable): slow network detected (2G or slow-2g)
• Red (offline): no internet connection

Live updates

The sidebar refreshes every 30 seconds to pull your latest chats and your inbox's unread count. Your permissions and the extensions you're allowed, which decide the Data and Organization places, are read again when you come back to the Strata tab (it becomes visible or regains focus), at most once a minute, so when an admin changes your role, groups or extensions the sidebar catches up without a reload. If Strata can't read the extensions you're allowed in full at that moment (for example, it misses the roles your groups give you), the sidebar hides nothing on that answer: Data shows whenever you have a SQL Server connection, Knowledge Base whenever your permissions allow it, and Strata still checks the extension when you open the page.

Key

Data across surfaces (e.g., you rename a chat in one tab and pin it in another) syncs immediately; you don't need to refresh to see changes.

Keyboard shortcuts

Related

• Chat overview: how to use the chat workspace
• Agents overview: creating and monitoring agents
• Inbox: understanding messages and notifications
• Keyboard shortcuts: the full shortcut list