XTRF Chat overview

Owned by Oksana Vishchuk
Last updated: Apr 18, 2024 by Damian Rozmiarkowski
6 min read

What is the XTRF Chat?

The XTRF Chat is a dedicated chat space designed to simplify group communication for localization businesses. It keeps the key e-mail features like file attachments, audience selection, and history and context review while adding all the advantages of a live conversation. Once you open a new project or task on the Home Portal and add people to it, the XTRF Chat automatically creates chat rooms for real-time contact between project managers, project coordinators, and vendor contact persons. The information shared within chat rooms remains available even when the project is closed or canceled.

Use the XTRF Chat to

  • Avoid redundancies. We all know how e-mail chains can devolve during the course of a project: confusing threads, buried attachments, and subjects that get mixed up across messages. XTRF Chat helps you avoid forwarding, duplicating, and CC'ing and therefore saves everyone time, which is essential when tackling several projects in multiple languages.

  • Support your remote teams. XTRF Chat helps remote teams communicate quickly with fast, natural, and conversational responses, stopping people from feeling disconnected or 'out of the loop.' XTRF Chat monitors the changes in the project team and automatically updates the list of people participating in the discussion about the project.

Standalone XTRF Chat web app

The XTRF Chat supports three user roles:

  • Managers (Home Portal users that are assigned to projects and quotes as project managers or project coordinators)

  • Admins (XTRF Chat Managers that were assigned an additional Admin role)

  • Vendors (Home Portal vendor contact persons).

To learn more about the options available for those user roles, see the corresponding articles:

Enable the XTRF Chat

The XTRF Chat is free for all XTRF license holders.

To enable, disable, or reenable the XTRF Chat, please submit a request to the XTRF Help Desk.

XTRF Chat can't be enabled or disabled per project or quote, only for the whole XTRF Platform.

  • When the XTRF Chat is enabled for your XTRF Platform, a corresponding workspace is created, and all new projects and quotes will automatically have chat rooms set up for them in this new workspace.

  • Disabling the XTRF Chat breaks the link between your XTRF Platform and Chat workspace. This cannot be undone. There is no option to restore communication from discontinued workspaces in XTRF Chat. This means that the conversation history and attachment library would be permanently deleted.

  • Re-enabling the XTRF Chat creates an entirely new Chat workspace with new chat rooms for each new project or quote.

XTRF Chat interface

XTRF Chat is a cloud-based application that manages chat rooms and chat user accounts shared among all XTRF platforms. Each XTRF platform connects to the Chat application via an API.

XTRF Chat comes as:

  • An app embedded within the XTRF Home Portal

  • A standalone web application

  • A standalone mobile app.

Each version of the XTRF Chat has a similar chat window design that consists of:

  1. Workspace name.

  2. Tabs:

    1. Ongoing (contains only open projects and quotes)

    2. All (contains all projects and quotes, including closed, archived, and rejected ones)

    3. Settings.

  3. List of linked projects and quotes

  4. List of chat rooms within a project or a quote.

  5. App section, where the active apps appear.

Vendor anonymization

To protect vendors' privacy and clients' sensitive information, vendors can be anonymized in the chat rooms. When anonymization is enabled, vendor names are replaced with a random pseudonym referring to a plant name (e.g., Loosestrife, Elephant Ears, etc.). 

  • Pseudonyms are assigned to vendors automatically.

  • Vendors always have the same pseudonym assigned in all chat rooms within a workspace. 

  • Managers always see the vendors' avatars and real names followed by pseudonyms in brackets.

  • Vendors can only see the pseudonyms of other vendors and the pseudonym initials instead of avatars in the All project members chat room.

  • Manager names are never hidden.

  • If workspace members are deleted from the workspace or leave at their own request, their name is changed to Deleted with a random string of numbers, even if vendor anonymization was turned off.

  • Deleted users' avatars change into question marks.

Workspace admin panel

The XTRF Chat workspaces can be managed by users with the admin role in the Admin workspace panel. For details, see the Manage the XTRF Chat Workspace guide.

Notifier built-in app

Notifier is a chatbot application built into the XTRF Chat to remind managers and vendors about deadlines and other important milestones in a project life cycle.

How to enable the Notifier in XTRF Chat?

To enable or disable the Notifier, please contact the XTRF Help Desk.

Admins can check the status of available apps in the Admin workspace panel.

Types of notifications

The Notifier app will send different reminders depending on the user’s role.

Managers get notifications about:

  • being assigned to a project

  • a job being finished by a vendor.

Vendors get notification about:

  • a job being started, canceled, or reopened

  • job files being added or removed

  • change of the start or deadline dates

  • change of the job instructions.

Vendors can additionally turn on and configure job deadline reminders. For details, see the Enable job deadline notifications in the XTRF Chat guide.

Where can you find the reminders from the Notifier app?

The Notifier’s reminders are blended into the All project members chat of each project so that you can observe the natural progression and transition of the workflow in sync with team communications.