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The Daily Brief is your read-of-the-day. The Now bar is the read-of-the-minute: a compact strip between the brief tabs and the brief body, telling you what’s open in the queue right now.

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What it shows

Now  ·  42 open  ·  oldest 3h12m  ·  4 unassigned  ·  on shift: Sarah, Tom, Priya

Open count

Total conversations in state=open in your helpdesk.

Oldest unresponded

Age of the oldest open conversation, in human-readable units. Turns red after 60 minutes.

Unassigned

Open conversations with no admin assignee.

On shift

Agents whose helpdesk presence is not in away mode.
The strip only renders when a snapshot is available. If no helpdesk is connected, the bar stays hidden.

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How it’s populated

The worker polls your connected helpdesk every 10 minutes and stores one row in live_queue_snapshots. The Now bar reads the most recent row.
Today the only live source is Intercom. Other providers will populate the table as their adapters land. The bar shows the source label so you can tell which helpdesk the snapshot came from.
You can force a poll from the bar via the Refresh button. The endpoint is rate-limited to 30 calls per hour per workspace; the cron’s auto-poll counts against the same budget so you’re not stepping on yourself.

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Via Slack

If you have the Slack integration enabled: 
/forepost now
Returns the latest snapshot in-line:
Now: 42 open · oldest 3h12m · 4 unassigned (as of 2026-05-11 09:42 UTC)
The Slack output uses the same row as the in-app bar — no extra poll fires.

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API

GET  /now            # latest snapshot
POST /now/poll       # owner/admin: force a refresh (rate-limited 30/hr)

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What it isn’t

  • Not a triage view. The Now bar tells you what; you triage in your helpdesk. Click the open count (coming) to jump to the filtered helpdesk inbox via your deep-link template.
  • Not a real-time stream. 10-minute polling is the cadence — fresh enough to spot a queue spike, sparse enough not to hammer the helpdesk API.

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Privacy

Snapshots store counts only; no conversation content. The onShiftAgents field is a JSON array of agent names from the helpdesk’s admins endpoint. Snapshots older than seven days are pruned by the cron.