6 new apps for Slack to boost your team’s productivity

Trawling shared drives and folders to find the information you need, sifting through emails to unearth long-gone requests, and transferring data from one place to another can turn an otherwise productive day into one filled with busywork.

Slack connects with a variety of business tools and services that allow team members to consolidate their work and access the information they need from one place. And with more apps being added to the directory all the time, like travel and expense app Concur and Adobe Creative Cloud, we’ve put together a short list of new and noteworthy ones that will help you do everything from aligning the team around shared objectives and key results (OKRs), to streamlining communication between sales and marketing, to automating visitor and guest access to your office.

Track the team’s objectives and key results (OKRs)—Ally

With the Ally integration, you can easily set and monitor team OKRs from right inside Slack (and say goodbye to unwieldy and quickly outdated spreadsheets). If this goal-management framework is new to you, don’t fret: The app comes with built-in best practices and automation that walks you through it.

 

 

Use the Ally app for Slack to:

• Align your team around top priorities, objectives, and areas of focus
• Increase transparency around shared goals
• Provide ongoing feedback to the team
• Improve team engagement by maintaining a consistent feedback loop

 

Close sales deals faster—Zoho CRM

New among the bevy of Slack apps and integrations offered by Zoho is Zoho CRM, a software that allows teams to bring sales, marketing, customer support, and inventory management into one single system. Integrating Zoho CRM with Slack means that teams can easily pull data—like customer contacts and lead generation reports—from the CRM into a Slack channel so that both stakeholders and team members have enough context to make speedy decisions.

 

 

Use the Zoho CRM integration for Slack to:

• Easily share information about new leads, contacts, accounts, and deals
• Share and discuss analytics and reports team-wide
• Reduce the time spent searching through databases and folders for information
• Update the status of deal progress

 

Automate office security, visitor check-in, and package delivery—Envoy

No need to pace around the lobby while waiting for visitors or expecting packages, when the newest version of Envoy’s app for Slack can send you a direct message to notify you of deliveries and guests. It also includes interactive features like instant responses that notify front-desk personnel if you’re away, running late, or unavailable.

 

Use the Envoy and Slack integration to:

• Receive and reply to direct messages when visitors and packages arrive
• Know who is in the building at all times through secure sign-in and badge printing features for visitors

 

Sync messages, notes, and documents across platforms—Evernote

Post-meeting action items, ideas from team brainstorms: Any message posted to a Slack channel can be converted into a handy Evernote note. Or if you’d rather share a note for the team to discuss in Slack, simply copy and paste the note’s URL into Slack, and the whole team will see a preview of its contents. And did we mention that you can also search for content on Evernote from right within Slack? Skip the toggling and the context-switching and get back to work.

 

 

Evernote’s app for Slack allows you to:

• Automatically sync Slack channel messages with your Evernote
• Search Evernote notes from within Slack
• Share Evernote notes in Slack without breaking the flow of conversation

 

Manage projects more efficiently—Monday.com

Monday.com (formerly dapulse) is a project management tool that helps teams stay productive by mapping tasks and workflows to boards. Now that it’s integrated with Slack, teams can connect boards in Monday.com with specific Slack channels so that team members can get notifications when the status of a project has changed or when there’s a new update or comment. And with all this information showing up in Slack channels, leaders and stakeholders have added visibility into how projects are tracking, without disrupting or distracting individual team members.

 

 

Use the Monday.com and Slack integration to:

• Link Monday.com boards to specific channels in Slack
• Create a new task from a Slack message or by using the slash command /monday-pulse
• Receive messages in a specific Slack channel each time a change is made to a board

 

Build your own app for Slack—Slack Developer Tools

Some organizations are fortunate enough to have talented folks on their teams who can build their own custom integrations for Slack. For anyone foraying into this world, our developer tools help make this process easier by allowing you to do things like debug your app as you build it. You can find more of the nitty-gritty details on our developer blog.

What you can do with Slack Developer Tools:

• Learn about Slack API methods
• Access implementation documentation about specific API methods
• Instantly view related API documentation
• Inspect messages to see how they were built and view the code used to build them

 

When you tie your tools to Slack, employees are more productive because they have the information they need right when they need it. Rather than spending time toggling between tools, they can stay focused on matters at hand, saving time and effort likely better spent on resolving issues, delighting customers, and growing the business.

 

See what other apps and services connect to Slack and how they help teams be more productive at work—slack.com/apps