Make work flow faster with Slack’s new platform

The future of work is not easy to predict. Just last year, organisations were navigating remote and hybrid work as we began to emerge from the pandemic. Now they face new challenges: global inflation and supply chain disruptions that are tightening budgets.

To do more with what they already have, leading organisations are investing in a digital HQ – a single space to connect your people, tools, customers and partners for faster and more flexible work. The Slack platform makes it easy to customise your digital HQ to your organisation’s unique needs, helping you to scale your business by increasing productivity.

We’ve re-engineered our platform from the ground up to help you achieve these results faster. Today at Dreamforce, we’re announcing that the new Slack platform is available to developers in open beta. You’ll be able to build time-saving automations that move work faster during the moments that count most, whether it’s closing deals, launching campaigns or swarming incidents.

In a survey of global Slack customers, respondents reported an average 29% increase in time savings from automation and 30% higher engagement with integrated apps since implementing Slack (Salesforce: Slack Customer Success Metrics, 2022).

Now it’s easier than ever to build automations that streamline work across your people and business-critical systems, such as Salesforce’s Customer 360. Teammates can also share workflows from anywhere in Slack, including channels, Slack huddles and Slack canvas – a new surface in your digital HQ where teams can curate, organise and share resources.

Maximise your code’s value

 

Re-engineering our platform meant creating a brand-new modular architecture that gives developers a faster, more flexible way to build on top of Slack. Now developers can tailor solutions based on their unique business needs.

• Go from idea to deployment faster. With a new set of developer tools, spend less time on set-up and more time problem-solving. Our new Slack command-line interface (CLI) and software development kit (SDK) make it simpler to build, run and deploy code in Slack’s secure, compliant environment.
• Do more with less. With modular, reusable functions, easily repurpose and swap out code across Slack workflows, reducing redundant development, maintenance and tech debt.
• Accelerate user adoption. Add a link trigger to your workflow to start and share workflows from anywhere in Slack:
  • Direct colleagues to processes by sharing a workflow in a Slack message
  • Save workflows to a channel’s bookmarks bar, where users are already adding important links to dashboards, documents and messages
  • Turn a conversation into actionable next steps by adding a workflow in a huddle thread
  • Next year, you’ll be able to embed workflows in a canvas, pairing critical context with the actions required to move work forwards

As part of the open beta release, you’ll gain more end-to-end control to customise your workflows with code. In addition to building custom functions, you can now build custom triggers to define exactly when you want a workflow to run, whether they’re set in motion by a user’s interaction, scheduled for a specific time and date, or automated based on a system event.

While many developers save time and effort by deploying code to Slack, others want to use their own infrastructure and on-premise-friendly features. The open beta now supports Slack’s Bolt framework, so you can build on the new platform using SDKs that you are familiar with and deploy code to your own infrastructure.

Lastly, we’ve made a number of updates to the Slack CLI to improve developer ergonomics, including:

• A library of open source templates that serve as a starting point for your app
• Local development via socket mode
• The ability to easily store and manage data for any function in Slack

Stay current with what’s new and updated with the open beta by reading our changelog.

Start building with the new platform today

By using Bolt with our modular architecture, defining custom triggers for your workflows, and applying the improvements that were made to the Slack CLI and SDK, you can build automations that move your business faster and save invaluable time.

Head over to the Slack API site, where you can download the CLI and find tutorials and sample apps to jump-start development. If you’re looking for more hands-on guidance, join us for an upcoming webinar, where Slack’s technical experts will take you through the steps to making the most of the new platform.

We can’t wait to see what you build!