Managing Slack at scale: advance your career and deepen impact with new admin tools

Admins, you are vital partners in our mission to improve people’s working lives. To better support your efforts, we’ve made it simple to:

• Certify your Slack expertise
• Analyze and increase your team’s Slack engagement
• Drive adoption of calendar apps at scale
• Manage your enterprise with ease

Certify your Slack expertise

As Slack adoption continues to grow, the demand for experienced Slack admins is increasing alongside it. Thousands of customers, including leaders like Oracle, IBM and Verizon, have dedicated roles specifically for Slack admins to drive and standardize agile ways of working at scale.

“Being a Slack admin is more than rolling out a new tool,” says Christina Kosmowski, the VP of Customer Success and Services at Slack. “It means fearlessly undertaking the process of changing how an organization works. We’re inspired by our admins and committed to their success—not only in their current organization, but also in their careers.”

To equip admins with valuable skills for the next generation of jobs, our Slack Certified program will soon be available online. We’re also offering scholarships for qualified candidates to earn their admin certifications at no cost. After successfully completing the program, participants receive an official badge, increasing their credibility and improving job prospects at Slack’s customer organizations, system integration partners and more.

Becoming Slack Certified establishes an admin’s credentials externally, but we’re also releasing features and capabilities that will extend an admin’s impact in their own organization.

Analyze and increase your team’s Slack engagement

When admins help their teams move announcements and daily operations from siloed inboxes to Slack channels, everyone can gather context, stay aligned and move their work forward faster. Now, we’re introducing new ways for admins to understand and drive this transition through translating Slack engagement data into actionable insights.

Are your remote teams engaged? Are they actually reading important announcements from your internal communications team? Message activity (available for Plus and Grid plans) pulls rich data on the reach, impact and engagement with Slack messages, making admins a key partner to internal communications teams and executives.

For messages in public channels with 50 or more members, admins and owners can see:

• Reach and engagement over time
• The device breakdown of where users typically first view the post
• Top replies by the number of reactions
• Viewers by department, if available via SCIM

We’re also releasing a new set of analytics APIs (available for Grid plans) that integrate Slack engagement data with business reporting tools. These APIs allow admins to bring Slack usage data into their existing dashboards, so it’s easy to analyze Slack engagement based on KPIs their organization cares about.

Admins can use these new APIs to:

• Track all software engagement in one place
• Automate routine reporting tasks
• Compare Slack engagement with other tools

Drive adoption of calendar apps at scale

Integrating enterprise-wide productivity tools with Slack is one of the most meaningful actions an admin can drive, because it helps their organization get more value from its existing software investments. More than 150,000 teams, for example, already integrate their calendar apps with Slack. These apps reduce the time users spend jumping between tabs by making these everyday tools accessible in Slack, where they’re already working.

Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar apps for Slack bring a user’s meeting invites and schedule into Slack so it’s easy to stay on top of their time. Users receive a friendly nudge when a meeting is about to start and can join conference calls in a click—no fumbling for links required.

Now, admins can increase adoption of these apps at an accelerated pace. Instead of requiring each employee to authenticate their account, admins can automatically authorize calendar apps (available for all plans) across the company in a few steps.

With this top-down approach, admins can unlock productivity across the organization. In fact, SoFi, an online personal finance company with over 1,500 employees, experienced a 790% increase in weekly Google Calendar users after using domain authentication to automatically set up calendar apps.

Manage your enterprise with ease

We’re introducing improvements that help you tackle manual administrative tasks at a quicker pace—so you can focus your efforts on enterprise-wide initiatives that improve how your team works in Slack.

This starts with centralized channel management (available for Grid plans), which is a fancy way of saying that admins will have one main dashboard to view and manage channels across their organization. All it takes is a few clicks on the dashboard to rename, archive, edit permissions and more.

While onboarding is a one-time experience for most employees, Slack admins are involved with the process every day. Now, admins can automatically add employees to relevant channels (available for Grid plans) according to their department. By linking channel membership with Identity Provider (IDP) groups, a new marketing employee, for example, will immediately be invited to default channels like #marketing-team, #brand-announcements and #social-media.

We’re always working on ways to make it easier for admins to deploy and manage Slack—at the scale of their organization today and the size it will grow into in the years to come. To make sure that your team can take advantage of all these improvements, visit our Help Center for instructions on creating announcement channels and api.slack.com for guides to our APIs.

The above information is intended for INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, and not as a binding commitment. Please do not rely on this information in making your purchasing decisions. The development, release and timing of any products, features or functionality remain at the sole discretion of Slack, and are subject to change.