Another user group in the books, this time we joined forces with the Prague Slack Group and learnt more about this tool. It happened just before Dreamforce so we didn’t have the latest and greatest news, but is was still great. You can check some photos and presentation or just read further to my summary.
Tom Jirinec walked us through all the great things Slack can offer, we spoke about the basics such as how to post message, tag someone, create channels, group them, use emoticons (actually one of the important skills worth even asking in the certification), shortcuts (he really uses them a lot), huddles (which looks like finally working without problems), Slack Connect (I heard that even Salesforce AE offers customers to add them into their workspace and have a swift communication) and finally about apps which can be integrate and workflow to support structured and/or repetitive tasks.
While I originally saw Slack just as a messaging tool which will just convert the email communication into this chat, so basically you still have the same amount of requests to process or even more, as people write quickly and send multiple messages instead of one well-thought email, with all the integrations in starts to make sense.
Naturally we also spoke about the integration with Salesforce, which is getting better every release (of the apps, which are still separated). I’m still not a fan of the ability to attach Slack messages to the record in Salesforce (as it has to be done manually) and feel Chatter is still more the record based chat while Slack is the not context related chat, but I like all the other possibilites, one of them presented at North East Community Group.
Which leads me to certifications, which now exists for admins with heavy focus on licencing and what implications it has on user provisioning, on naming structure and using emoticons. The second one is for developers, where the first 3 chapters of the preparation course focus on the possibilities and user experience and the rest is heavy on different APIs and which token use when.
It would be awesome to have some certification for consultants, which would cover how to setup the system, how to engage users, how to create a new app and what are the „UI related“ limits.
All in all, this possibility to develop a new app, create workflow or use a Salesforce Flow in Slack (as presented at CzechDreamin by Alex Edelstein) are great ideas where we, as Salesforce partner, might find some new space where to offer our services.
What’s next? Next Prague User Group will happen most likely in the second half of November and while wrap-up the Dreamforce, for next Slack meetup sign up and let’s see. But it is definitely a technology I’ll pay attention to.