Email is too slow for a live post. Phone trees break down the moment three guards need the same update. Personal texts leave no record and hand out everyone's mobile number. Channels give the shift one place to talk.

Set up channels along the lines your operation already runs on: one per site, one per function, one per shift, and a throwaway one per major incident. Keep the roster on the channel rather than in someone's phone, mute the noisy ones instead of leaving them, and export anything you might need later before the retention window closes. Channels are for coordination. Emergencies go through SOS and dispatch.

When is a channel the right tool?

Not always. Channels are good at group coordination and bad at the two extremes: a genuinely private conversation and a genuinely urgent one.

Method	Good For	Not Good For
Email	Formal documentation	Urgent communication
Phone calls	Private 1:1 discussion	Group coordination
Text messages	Quick personal notes	Team-wide updates
Voice notes	Hands busy, detail hard to type	Information that needs reference
Channels	Team coordination, updates	Real-time emergencies

Read the last row twice. A guard in trouble should be pressing SOS, not typing into a channel and hoping a supervisor is looking at their phone. Same for anything that needs a unit moved now, which is what dispatch is for.

What channels buy you is the boring stuff that matters six months later. Messages stay in context by site and topic. A guard who joins the account in March can read back through what happened in February. Nobody has to hand out a personal phone number. And it is searchable, which the group text on someone's private phone is not.

How should you structure your channels?

Mirror the operation. If a dispatcher would say it out loud as a place, a role or a shift, it is probably a channel.

Category	Channel Examples	Purpose
Company-wide	#announcements, #all-hands	Official communications
Site-specific	#corporate-hq, #warehouse-a	Site operations
Functional	#dispatch, #supervisors	Role-based coordination
Shift-based	#day-shift, #overnight	Shift coordination
Incident	#incident-2026-001	Specific event coordination

Resist one channel per client contact and one per equipment type. A channel nobody posts in is worse than no channel, because it teaches people that the unread badge means nothing.

Creating a channel

Open TeamMap and go to Chat.
Choose to create a channel.
Enter the name and a description that says what belongs in it.
Add members and groups.
Decide whether to include yourself. An account manager setting up a site channel for a crew they are not on can turn that off.
Mark it private if it should be members only.
Create it.

One rule the app enforces: a private channel has to include you, and it needs its people picked by name rather than by group. Otherwise you could build a room nobody, including you, could open afterwards.

Open or private?

Type	Visibility	Use Cases
Open	Anyone on your team can open it and read back	General announcements, site channels
Private	Members only, including its photos and recordings	Supervisors, HR matters, investigations

Private means private all the way down. Someone outside a private channel cannot open it, read its messages, or play its voice recordings. That is the setting for an investigation into one of your own officers, and it is the wrong setting for a site channel that a relief guard will need at 2am.

What do good messages look like?

Four shapes cover almost everything a shift posts.

Type	Format	Example
Announcement	Clear header, key info	"SCHEDULE CHANGE: Monday shifts start 0700 not 0600"
Update	Brief status	"Loading dock clear, delivery complete"
Question	Clear ask, context	"Does anyone have the code for Conference Room B?"
BOLO	Description, action	"BOLO: Red Honda Civic, plate ABC123, suspected theft. Call dispatch if seen."

Do

Keep it work related
Post in the channel the topic belongs to
Say the thing, then the detail
Acknowledge anything that changes the post
Use a thread when a message turns into a discussion
Mention the person who has to act

Do not

Air personal complaints
Put confidential detail in an open channel
Shout in caps
Send non-urgent messages overnight to people who are asleep
Hold a two-person conversation in a twenty-person channel
Post photos of people who did not agree to it

The shift handoff deserves its own format rather than a freeform post. There is a structure that works in the shift handoff SOP template, and the same discipline applied to the written record is covered in writing incident reports people actually read.

How do notifications work?

Three settings, and the difference between them is what still gets through.

Setting	Behavior	Use For
Unmuted (default)	Push alert on every message	Channels you act on
Muted channel	No push and no sound, but the unread count still rises and mentions still come through	High-traffic or reference channels
Muted category	Silences a whole category: tasks, shifts, chat, reports or system	Quiet hours on a personal device

One category cannot be muted at all. Safety alerts are exempt by design, so SOS, geofence breaches, missed checkpoints, overdue routes, lone-worker alerts and new incidents reach the device whatever else a person has silenced. That is deliberate. The whole point of a mute control is that people trust it enough to use it, which only works if the alert that matters is not in it.

Muting a channel is the pressure valve that keeps people from leaving it. A guard who mutes #announcements still gets the unread badge, and still gets a push the moment someone mentions them by name. That is the design: the noise stops, the direct ask does not.

Which makes mentions the tool you spend carefully. Mention the person who has to do something. Do not mention six people so that one of them reads it, because the next time you mention any of them it will be worth less.

When should you spin up an incident channel?

When the event is going to outlive the shift, or outgrow one radio channel.

Major incidents that need more than one person coordinating
Anything running past a shift change
Multiple teams or outside agencies involved
Anything you expect to hand to a lawyer or an insurer

Name it so the name sorts and reads on its own: #incident-2026-01-15-fire-alarm. Add every responder, pin the location and the contacts, and post status on a rhythm rather than when someone asks. If the event is big enough to need a formal command structure over the top of it, ICS for security teams covers how that fits together, and the escalation matrix settles who gets called before anyone has to guess.

Close it deliberately. Post a summary, then export the channel or attach the proof to the incident record. A channel that just goes quiet is a channel whose history is on a countdown.

How long does the history last?

Longer than a group text, and not forever. Chat retention is set by your plan and by the "Keep messages for" setting: 7 days on Free, 30 on Pro, 180 on Business, 365 on Enterprise. You can shorten it below your plan's ceiling. You cannot go above it. Free also caps the team at 20 messages a month, so it is a trial of the idea rather than a working radio.

Inside that window, search does the work. Search a channel by keyword, step through the matches in order, tap one to jump straight to it in the conversation, and any attachment is still sitting on the message you landed on. There is also a jump-to-day control for when you know roughly when something happened but not what was said.

For anything you need to keep past the window, use Export Channel Data from the channel menu, pick what to include, and download it as CSV or Excel. Do that before you delete a channel, not after. Deleting a channel removes its messages permanently and there is nothing to recover afterwards.

Retention is a legal decision as much as a storage one. If a channel documents an injury, a use of force, or anything a client may dispute, export it the week it happens and file it with the incident. Do not rely on the window still being open when a subpoena turns up eight months later.

Everything above sits alongside direct messages, group chats and voice notes. There is a fuller picture of how the pieces fit on the communication feature page, and digital incident reporting covers where the channel conversation should end up when it becomes a record.

Key Takeaways

Structure channels by site, function and shift. Delete the ones nobody posts in.
Channels coordinate. Emergencies go through SOS and dispatch.
Private channels hide messages, photos and recordings from everyone outside the member list.
Muting stops push alerts but keeps unread counts and mentions, so people mute instead of leaving.
Chat retention runs 7 days on Free, 30 on Pro, 180 on Business. Export anything you need beyond that.

When is a channel the right tool?

Not always. Channels are good at group coordination and bad at the two extremes: a genuinely private conversation and a genuinely urgent one.

Method	Good For	Not Good For
Email	Formal documentation	Urgent communication
Phone calls	Private 1:1 discussion	Group coordination
Text messages	Quick personal notes	Team-wide updates
Voice notes	Hands busy, detail hard to type	Information that needs reference
Channels	Team coordination, updates	Real-time emergencies

How should you structure your channels?

Mirror the operation. If a dispatcher would say it out loud as a place, a role or a shift, it is probably a channel.

Category	Channel Examples	Purpose
Company-wide	#announcements, #all-hands	Official communications
Site-specific	#corporate-hq, #warehouse-a	Site operations
Functional	#dispatch, #supervisors	Role-based coordination
Shift-based	#day-shift, #overnight	Shift coordination
Incident	#incident-2026-001	Specific event coordination

Resist one channel per client contact and one per equipment type. A channel nobody posts in is worse than no channel, because it teaches people that the unread badge means nothing.