Make work flow faster with Slack’s new platform

The future of work is not easy to predict. Just last year, organizations were navigating remote and hybrid work as we entered the next stage of 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 organizations 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 takes your digital HQ to the next level by integrating your unique mix of tools and bringing time-saving automations where your team already collaborates. After implementing Slack, customers reported an average 29% increase in time savings from automation and 30% higher engagement with integrated apps (Salesforce: Slack Customer Success Metrics, 2022).

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. Now it’s easier than ever to build automations that move work forward in Slack during the moments that count most, whether it’s closing deals, swarming incidents, or optimizing campaigns.

You’ll be able to quickly build end-to-end automations that streamline work across your team and business-critical systems, like 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, organize and share resources.

Maximize your code’s value

 

Re-engineering our platform meant creating a brand-new modular architecture and delivering tools that power a faster, more flexible way to build on top of Slack.

• Go from idea to deployment faster. New tools like our Slack command-line interface (CLI) and software development kit (SDK) streamline development and build, run and deploy code in Slack’s secure, compliant environment.
• Do more with less. Create modular building blocks — functions, triggers, and workflows — that anyone can use to power their own custom automations. With a centralized place to share and reuse code, you’ll be able to reduce redundant development, maintenance and tech debt.
• Accelerate user adoption. Getting adoption can sometimes feel more challenging than the development itself. Add a link trigger to your workflow, giving users an easy way to start and share workflows from anywhere in Slack:
  • Quickly 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 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 forward

As part of the open beta release, you’ll gain more end-to-end control to customize 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 Run on Slack makes it quick and easy to build new Slack apps, many of you have apps that you already rely on. With the open beta, you now have the flexibility to extend new platform features such as custom functions to these existing apps using Slack’s Bolt framework for JavaScript.

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, and more.

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

Start building with the new platform today

By creating modular, reusable building blocks and using the newly improved Slack CLI and SDK, you can build automations that move your business forward 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 walk you through the steps to making the most of the new platform.

We can’t wait to see what you build!