Element Pro Web introduces Grid View
In operational environments — such as government agencies, emergency response teams, or critical infrastructure operations — teams often need to monitor multiple communication channels simultaneously.
So we’re delighted to release Grid View to monitor, send and receive messages across multiple rooms simultaneously. It’s designed for teams that need to keep an eye on several conversations and data feeds simultaneously. It provides a clean, flexible workspace designed for fast, continuous awareness; it’ll typically be deployed in big screen environments such as control rooms, contact centres and cyber operations.
We’ve chosen to make Grid View a part of Element Pro (our dedicated workplace app that comes with ESS Pro), given the pronounced need for dashboarding in our public sector customer base. Ideally features like this which empower end-users would be in open source Element, but in order to fund our work on open source Element we need to ensure we provide clear value for paying customers, and we believe this is a fair tradeoff in this instance.
Grid View in action
When activated by your system administrator, Grid View appears as a new entry point on the left-hand panel. From there, you can build a personalised view made up of any number of rooms. You decide which rooms you want to watch, how they should be arranged, and how much space each one should take. The layout is fully adjustable, and you can reorder and resize tiles at any time.
Each tile in Grid View shows a live room timeline, and you can read and send messages directly from within the tile. If you need the full room interface — including calls, settings, pinned messages, or threads — just select Expand in the top-right corner of the tile. This opens the room in All Chats view without interrupting your grid.
A key detail in Grid View is how unread behaviour works. We’ve designed it so that read receipts only move when you focus on a room. If a tile isn’t focused, new messages will display as unread, letting you immediately see which rooms need your attention next. This keeps monitoring predictable and prevents missing updates when multiple rooms are active at once.
On setting up your grid for the first time, you’ll be guided through the Manage Chats window, where you can add or remove rooms. After that, adding rooms is fast: manage, search, save. There is no maximum number of chat rooms that can be displayed, other than physical wall screen size.
Why this matters for operational teams: Grid View is designed for secure, mission-critical environments where visibility and responsiveness are essential. While Grid View brings a new level of visibility to multi-room workflows, it’s intentionally focused. The interface is designed for high-density monitoring. Some features - like threads, widgets, pinned messages, and in-tile calling - aren’t included in this view to ensure performance and clarity when viewing several timelines at once. Such features remain available in All Chats view, and can be accessed quickly using “Expand”.
Grid View is available now as a module for Element Pro Web & Desktop (via ESS Pro). If your role involves monitoring real-time information across several rooms, we think Grid View will make a meaningful difference to how you work.
We’re keen to hear how it supports your workflows, and what else you’d like to see as we continue to evolve this feature.