Manage Bots and Integrations

Slack wants to provide more features—way more features!—than the company could ever create on its own. Its approach is to be a platform upon which other services can build. This commitment, and third-party developers’ embrace of it, has become one of the best things about Slack.

Making conduits to other ecosystems possible, and providing access to extra single-purpose tools, even tiny ones, makes Slack richer and more useful. These third-party connections are called integrations, though Slack has moved to more frequently referring to them as apps.

For example, your team may be using an integration with a task-management system like Trello or JIRA to push certain notifications into a Slack channel or to you via a direct message. Integrations also include automated-response systems, or bots. A bot appears like another team member, and can respond to a variety of requests, from ordering a pizza to updating a linked calendar.

All teams include Slackbot, which is built by Slack and a key part of how Slack “talks” to you privately about things happening in Slack, such as you being invited to another channel. Slackbot also conveys certain public information, like everyone being reminded of an event.

Note: Slackbot isn’t an integration, even though other bots are, because it’s part of Slack and can’t be removed, and isn’t configured in the same way as third-party connections to your Slack team.

I look to Twitter’s early years as an example of what Slack could become. Twitter initially welcomed third-party software to spread the use of its microblogging service, and gave developers broad and deep access to its application programming interface (API) to capture data and post messages. Twitter developers adopted conventions like filtering by @handles and options like muting long before Twitter integrated those as core features.

Note: Twitter eventually decided to abandon this approach as its revenue comes from advertising and the company wanted more direct control of how every message appeared.

Slack guides its product more strongly than Twitter did at its beginning, while providing robust tools for its developers. Because Slack charges for advanced features and is aimed at businesses that use expensive tools they may have spent years customizing, it’s highly unlikely that Slack will move in Twitter’s direction.

In this chapter, I first introduce you to Slackbot and then I look at how to Install Integrations.

Chat with Slackbot

Although Slack teams are primarily populated with real people, every Slack team includes a bot, a non-human automated interaction system, called Slackbot. With a presence icon in the shape of a heart , Slackbot is your plastic pal who’s fun to be with (to quote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy).

When you join a team, Slackbot welcomes you and invites you to fill out your team profile (Figure 123). It’s your concierge, too, talking to you when you paste in a link (such as to Google Drive) or use an integration to certain external services for the first time, like the project-management system Asana: Slackbot asks about your preferences for how Asana works with Slack and stores your answers in your Slack account in that team.

Figure 123: Slackbot says hello and offers suggestions for finishing your profile.

Slackbot was designed to be fun, useful, and not annoying. It has several functions.

Slackbot’s Public and Private Voices

Slackbot has two kinds of interactions with team members: public and private. When there’s a channel reminder (described below) or a sassy automated keyword response (also described below), Slackbot posts a public message. These public messages are things that everyone in a channel or conversation sees, and they appear in the same type style as members’ messages.

However, when Slackbot interacts with you directly, those messages are private. To emphasize that, Slack puts the note “Only you can see this message” to the right of its name in the message. In all but the iOS app, Slackbot’s private messages are in italics; in iOS, Slack puts a crosshatch behind a Slackbot message.

Watching for Alerts

When something happens in Slack that you should know about, you get a message from Slackbot, typically in the channel or conversation in which you’re already focused.

However, events can happen elsewhere, and Slackbot tracks those. A notable case is when someone else @mentions you in a channel in which you are not a member. Slackbot asks them whether to invite you or send you a link (Figure 124). Either way, you hear from Slackbot (Figure 125).

Figure 124: When Tonya @mentioned Adam in a channel that he hadn’t joined, Slackbot asked her what to do.

Figure 125: After Tonya clicked “send them a link to your message,” this alert appeared in Adam’s Slackbot conversation. When Adam clicked the link, he joined the channel.

Keeping Private Notes

Even though Slackbot is just a bot (sorry, Slackbot!), it looks and acts like a full team member in the Slack ecosystem. You can always find Slackbot in the sidebar under Direct Messages, even if you’ve never had a conversation with it.

If you switch to your conversation with Slackbot, you can use direct messages to store private notes and other information. Everything in this Slackbot conversation becomes searchable, but you’re the only one who sees those search results.

Note: In free groups, your personal notes are subject to the same 10,000 message limit as everything else.

You can do almost anything in a Slackbot conversation that you can in any other conversation, including applying formatting to messages.

Testing a Message

I often use my Slackbot conversation as a test bed. For instance, when I compose a post, I start in the Slackbot conversation, work on it while sharing it just with Slackbot, and only once it’s refined do I share it with a channel or an additional conversation (Figure 126).

Figure 126: If you want to create a post or snippet, or upload a file, you can try it privately in your Slackbot conversation first.

You can also upload files to your Slackbot conversation to see how they look in Slack or to make sure they appear in the message list as expected, before you upload them to another conversation or to a channel.

Making Reminders

You can make reminders yourself, for other teammates, and for a channel. A reminder you set for yourself will appear as a direct message from Slackbot, subject to any notification choices you’ve made for direct messages in all your Slack apps, no matter in which Slack app you made the reminder. A reminder for a teammate will also appear to them as a direct message from Slackbot, but subject to your teammate’s notification choices. A reminder for a channel appears in that channel as a regular message.

You can set up a general reminder, or you can ask Slack to remind you about a particular message:

• General reminder: Type your reminder in the Message field with the syntax /remind who what when. For example, /remind me to stand up in 10 minutes. You don’t have to put quotation marks around the “what” part to separate it from “when”; Slackbot parses that automatically.

  You can also directly message Slackbot without typing a slash, as in remind me of a call tomorrow at 2pm (Figure 127).

  

  Figure 127: Slackbot is digital gingko biloba.

  For reminders you create, you can remind yourself, other people, or entire channels. So you can say something like:

  /remind @adamengst article discussion on Tuesday at 3 pm or /remind #articles discuss latest issue tomorrow. Notice the syntax here, where to remind a person you type an @ with their handle, but to remind a channel you use a #.

  Reminders can recur automatically: use a pluralized day (Wednesdays) or every in association with something else (every two weeks).

• Message reminder: To remind yourself about a specific message (only in the desktop and Web apps), click the Message Actions button when you hover over the message in question, choose Remind Me about This, and then choose an interval (Figure 128).

Figure 128: You can choose to get reminders about individual messages.

To review a list of extant reminders that you’ve set for yourself and that other people have set for channels or conversations in which you’re a participant, either click View Existing Reminders after adding one (Figure 129), or issue the command /remind list. The list has active links that let you mark reminders as complete, delete them, or snooze them if they’re overdue. Click Dismiss, and the list disappears from the message list, too!

Figure 129: The reminder list shows both reminders you entered and those that other people have entered for you, as well as overdue reminders that you haven’t marked as complete.

Slackbot reminds you at the appropriate interval, and you can snooze it or tell it that you’ve taken care of it, in which case it updates the notice visually (Figure 130).

Figure 130: After a reminder is complete, Slackbot crosses it out.

Note: For more details on how to formulate reminders, see Slack’s Setting reminders help document.

Sass

Did I mention that Slackbot is sassy? Not necessarily by default, but you can up the sass quotient (or reduce it). If your team’s admin hasn’t turned the feature off, in Slack’s preferences on the Web (enter in your browser’s address field team-name.slack.com/customize/slackbot), you can set trigger words or phrases. In Figure 131, the trigger word “raccoons” results in “Don’t tell Glenn!”, because in that team I am associated with raccoons for reasons too amusing to explain here.

Figure 131: Raccoons and I have a close association. It may have to do with me not always staying on topic.

Each trigger word or phrase can have more than one response associated with it, and Slack selects randomly from multiple responses. Having different responses can make Slack seem more amusing and less relentless.

You can include both text and images in a response, using a URL to specify a path to an image; it’s expanded when Slackbot responds with that message. You can also use emoji in the standard :emoji-name: format. These responses are public, and are formatted like messages from other users.

I’ll be honest: This feature can get old fast if you pick any common word. While Slackbot chooses among all available responses, it always replies when a keyword is used, and thus any frequently used word causes Slackbot to natter on all the time. (I’ve suggested to the company that it use more randomization and settings to allow Slackbot to respond only 1 in X times, where team members or admins can set X.)

Install Integrations

Integrations expand Slack’s capabilities. An integration can be a special slash command, a bot, or a connection to some other service. Integrations are installed into a team.

Paid teams can install unlimited integrations; free teams can install up to ten. With free teams, the Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, and RSS feed options count as integrations, and are added the first time they’re invoked. This reduces the count of integrations remaining. With paid teams, several integrations, including Google Drive, are shown as available even before they’re linked to a remote account, as they’re so commonly used and there’s no integrations limit.

These integrations are installed in many Slack teams; if you belong to a bunch of teams, you might think they’re part of Slack:

• Giphy: With Giphy installed, type /giphy followed by one or more words and the animated GIF site’s extensive archives are combed for keyword matches, and then an “appropriate” randomly selected entry from that set is inserted into the messaging stream. It’s like visual punctuation.

Tip: Giphy often leads people to learn the slash command /collapse, which hides all open image and link previews in the current channel or conversation. If you find animated GIFs annoying or inappropriate, use /collapse or lobby to remove the Giphy integration entirely.

• Google Calendar: With this integration, you can push calendar events and reminders from a shared calendar into a channel, helping people remember what’s coming up (Figure 132).

Figure 132: Google Calendar can remind you of upcoming events, among other things.

• Google Hangouts: This integration lets you start a session from within Slack by typing /hangout; it inserts into the current channel or conversation a message containing a link that all participants can then click. (In testing, we found if Google Hangouts asks you to invite people to your hangout, you can just cancel that dialog.)
• IFTTT: This popular service is short for “if this, then that”—and it lets you specify conditions that cause something to happen, typically by connecting with at least one online service. For example, in IFTTT, you can set up a trigger that watches for a keyword to appear in the New York Times, and then posts a link to that article in a channel you specify. Or, you can have IFTTT respond to a geolocation trigger by posting a message to a Slack channel about your location.

  (While working on the manuscript for this book, we found that IFTTT’s competitor Zapier did a better job of alerting us when files were moved in a shared Dropbox folder, which helped know who was working on the manuscript at any given time.)

• Twitter: You can route messages to and from Twitter handles into a channel or conversation.

I suggest that you make a list of services you already use and check them against Slack’s availability. For examples of how integrations can improve your overall efficiency, see Centralize Communications into Slack, later. Also, Take Control of Slack Admin has a chapter about integrations that are interesting from an admin angle.

Note: Project management tools like Asana, Trello, and JIRA, have integrations that interact in many ways, including pushing updates into Slack channels. And Slack can be used to update tasks in those systems, too. For instance, in Trello Business Class, you can drag-and-drop a Slack message’s time stamp link onto a card in the Trello Web app, and Trello retrieves and inserts the message text into the card’s discussion.

Working with Bots

Bots can either monitor messages posted to channels and respond based on context, or they can respond to what’s said to them in a message or through slash commands. There are many types of bots. Some are rather limited, knowing only a few words or phrases that must be precise; others rely on something closer to natural-language processing, and can sort out meaning from complex statements. For instance, the Howdy bot can ask everyone in a team questions that you set, and then collate the answers.

The difference between a plain integration and a bot is interaction. A regular interaction works like depressing a mechanical switch to turn a light on or off or move a piece of paper from an inbox to an outbox. In contrast, a bot parses the text of a message you send it (whether you start the conversation or it asks you out of the blue), analyzes it in some fashion, and produces an action or a response.

You also know you’re talking with a bot other than Slackbot, if there’s any confusion, because the label appears to the right of the account name in the message list. (The iOS app does put after Slackbot’s name, but only for reminders.)

Some bots react based on syntax from preset queries; some interact with remote data or systems to perform actions and give you feedback; others go back and forth between real human beings, and act as an interface.

For instance, Adam Engst uses Statsbot for TidBITS, which provides reports from Google Analytics. And Emojibot helps you search for emoji, making it easier to react with exactly the right emoji.

Several companies offer bots that can have food delivered (once or recurring), book travel reservations, or carry out other routine real-world tasks.

Slack allows anyone with permission to add integrations to a team. Start with Slack’s Web-based App Directory, which works much like an app store for a smartphone (Figure 133). To navigate to the App Directory from within Slack, click the team name at the top of the main sidebar and choose Apps & Integrations. If you belong to more than one team, note that you can switch teams with the pop-up menu at the upper right.

Figure 133: The App Directory is a one-stop shop for adding and managing integrations.

Tip: To see which apps have already been linked to a team, click Manage near the top right of the App Directory and select a team from the pop-up menu at the right (it lists teams you are signed in to in the Slack Web app). (Another way to reach this page is to enter team-name.slack.com/apps/manage in your browser’s address field.)

You install an integration from its page in the App Directory, where you will see a button labeled either Install or Visit Site to Install. (For a team for which you lack permission to add integrations, the button will be gray and unclickable.)

The simpler, but less common, case is an Install button; click it, and the integration is added, and you can then configure it. For instance, the Tomatobot integration has an Install button (Figure 134).

Figure 134: Adding an integration is as simple as clicking Install.

For a Visit Site to Install button, once you click it, you will likely have to log in to that integration’s site. (If you haven’t set up an account at that site, you’ll need to do so or authenticate through Twitter, Google, or some third-party system, depending on the site). Whatever the process of associating yourself, you will then click Add to Slack, select the Slack team, and click the Authorize button (Figure 135).

Figure 135: Some integrations require a login.

Once you’ve installed an integration, it appears in the team’s Installed Apps list (accessed from the Manage button in the App Directory or by entering team-name.slack.com/apps/manage in your browser’s address field). When you view its entry, you typically find a little advice about using it, and an option for removing it from the team. You may also see an Edit button you can click to configure it—and in some cases, the remove option is inside the Edit option.

Other members of your team can see that the integration is installed and—if they have permission to work with apps and custom integrations—remove it or configure it.