Invite a guest into a group chat

Sometimes the right person for a conversation isn’t at your school at all — the parish event coordinator, the vendor running the fun fair, a co-planner from another school. A guest is an account built for exactly that: it takes part in the group chats you add it to, and nothing else.

What a guest can and can’t do:

• They see only the group chats an administrator adds them to — never the school-wide, grade, committee, or board chats.
• No announcements, calendar, documents, sign-up sheets, or knowledge base. No school directory, and no direct messages in either direction.
• Their name shows with a guest badge to everyone in those chats.
• Every guest account has an end date, at most a year out.
• Every message they send is screened before it posts, for as long as the account exists.

Turn guests on

Guests are off by default. Open Admin › Messages › Guests and choose Turn on guests. Turning guests off later suspends every guest immediately — nothing is deleted, and turning it back on restores anyone whose end date hasn’t passed.

Add a guest

1. Open Admin › People & roles and choose Add guest (the button appears once guests are turned on).
2. Enter their name and email, set when their access ends (it defaults to the end of the school year; one year is the maximum), and add a note so future-you remembers who this is — “Gala co-planner from St. Mark’s.”
3. From the guest’s row, choose Chats and add them to the group chats they need. They get an invite for each; until they accept, the chat isn’t visible to them.

Guests appear in the People list with their access date, and each row offers Extend and Revoke. Revoking ends access on the spot; their past messages stay, attributed to a former guest.

What families see

Nothing changes for families except a small guest badge beside the guest’s name in the chats they share. Guests can’t look anyone up, can’t be messaged directly, and can’t see any channel they weren’t explicitly added to.