What is Roomlio?
Roomlio is an embeddable chat platform. It allows you to simply and quickly embed a chat room in your existing applications, web pages, student/customer portals and more. It differs from existing chat applications because it focuses on embedding chat rooms in existing pages and web applications as opposed to requiring a separate app for chatting. You can think of it as offering embeddable "Twitch style" chat for all applications. Although Roomlio focuses on embedding chat rooms, it still provides an app for admins and operators to manage all the embedded channels and chat with embedded users.
Types of Rooms and where they can be used
Rooms are versatile and can be created and used in a number of ways depending on your specific use case. You can choose to embed an existing room (created in the Roomlio app) or dynamically create and name embedded rooms using our Javascript API.
General Rooms
You can think of general rooms as rooms that are created for a specific purpose. For example It could be a room created for a community of users discussing a specific topic, like students collaborating in a group. These kind of rooms are usually created in the Roomlio app and then manually embedded on a page/application using our embed script.
Dynamic Rooms
Dynamically created rooms can be created automatically and named using our API. Great use cases for these types of rooms would be for creating an embedded a room for each of your customers inside a dashboard or portal. For example your customer logs into your app and clicks "support" to chat with their account manager. Another use for these kind of rooms could be a live chat scenario where a new room is generated when an unknown user starts a chat on your website. Or rooms for each class at a school. The possibilities are only limited by your creativity.
App only Rooms
These are rooms that you have manually created inside the Roomlio app and have not enabled them to be embedded. Only users invited to your Roomlio account and logged into the Roomlio App can chat in these rooms. Non-embeddable rooms are visually indicated as such in the room sidebar with the box icon.
Getting Started
Signup for a Roomlio Account
If you haven't already, go ahead and sign up for a free unrestricted 14 day trial of Roomlio. You can trial any of our plans and we don't require a credit card in advance! https://app.roomlio.com/#/signup
Create your first Embedded Room
After you first sign up for Roomlio, you will be prompted to complete a few simple setup steps. The first thing to do is to test embedding a Room. You can either copy and paste the Client Embed Code into the source of a webpage or you can click "Demo Site" below to test the embed code on our own sample site.
After you have embedded a room send a test message from that room!
In the Roomlio app you will see that a new dynamic room has automatically been generated below the "Dynamic Rooms" section. Send a test message back!
Enable browser notifications
To make sure you get notified when someone sends a new message, be sure to enable browser notifications. You will see a link in the Quick Start guide that will prompt your browser to request those permissions:
Invite users to the Roomlio App
Roomlio is better with more people in your Team! Invite some new users to use your Roomlio account from the Team Members page: https://app.roomlio.com/#/settings/team-members
Create some more Rooms!
That's why you're here, isn't it?! Create as many rooms as you like for whatever purpose you need! You can create rooms dynamically by modifying the embed code or simply create them inside the Roomlio App by clicking the + in the top left.
Verify your Domain
It's highly recommended that you add your domain(s) under the Account Security page of the app: https://app.roomlio.com/#/settings/account-security
By default, your embed code could be used anywhere. To avoid a malicious party from using your embed code, be sure to lock it down to only domains where you will be using Roomlio.
Install the Roomlio App
Roomlio works well through your browser, although it's recommended that you install our app so you can more conveniently access Roomlio. (For those that are curious about the technical details, the Roomlio app is a Progressive Web Application [PWA]. That means it is a lightweight web app that behaves like traditional apps, but does not require installing and updating. Unlike a lot of chat apps, it does require or use Electron at all).
Install the App from your web browser's search bar using the "+" icon in the right hand side. Click the icon and press "Install"
Hopefully that helped get you going, but please reach out with questions!
If you have any questions, do not hesitate to reach out to us via our sidebar chat on roomlio.com, or email us; we would love to hear from you!