Slack Integrations — Game Changing Capabilities!
Mind. Blown. Couldn’t believe it until I saw it!
I’m in the process of setting up a new Slack team related to Microsoft Excel training. I am fairly new to using Slack integrations, but this will now change!
Integrations simply allow other services and apps to coordinate with Slack. I specifically wanted to integrate Box cloud storage to link to documents that are stored in Box.
“The companies announced an integration that enables Slack users to work with Box content directly within Slack. According to Box blog post penned by Slack engineer Ben Redmen, many of Slack’s 750,000 active users also use Box as their choice cloud storage provider.” — 4/28/15 — http://www.zdnet.com/article/slack-integrates-with-box-for-simplified-importing/
The advantages this enabled included:
- No need to store the document in Slack (thus, not using up storage quota in Slack), and
- As linked documents are updated in Box, the Slack documents would not need to be updated (this is significant!).
Now I Get Blown Away
Using my iPhone Slack app, I was conducting a search for VLOOKUP (just to understand what content had been included so far).
Slack found 4 items related to VLOOKUP — 3 posts and 1 file. However, the file DID NOT have VLOOKUP in the name.
Was Slack really searching and finding text within a pdf document located in Box? Yes it was.
Let’s walk through this — it is simply amazing technology!
The Slack / Box Search Process
- Access Slack search — let’s search for content including “VLOOKUP”
- Slack finds 3 messages and 1 file. Slack presents search modifiers to enable further filtering if need — this is extremely convenient!
- Tap “Files” and I see the one file it found searching for VLOOKUP. However, the term is not in the file name? So, Slack searches WITHIN the content of Box files shared in Slack! Tap file to open and tap “View in Browser”.
- View of file below. Tap “Search” icon to search for VLOOKUP.
- Results indicate “1 match found” — simply tap text to go to term in document view.
I hope this inspires you to take a look at Slack integrations. This is just one example, but I believe it is indicative of the types of integrations enabled across Slack and different SaaS applications!
About Don
“On a mission to challenge the status quo to a more productive and effective end…”
Don is passionate about helping professionals and organizations keep up and adapt to the changing business world that we operate in.
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