Here are the newest features coming to Slack

14 Aug 2019

Image: Slack

Slack has added a host of new features designed to help admins manage the platform at scale and streamline company announcements.

Productivity workplace platform Slack has today (14 August) announced a number of new features it is rolling out in order to make it easier for larger organisations to configure the app to best suit their needs.

“As Slack adoption at large enterprise organisations expands, administrative tasks such as granting guest access or setting up new workspaces becomes repetitive and time consuming when scaled to meet the needs of hundreds of thousands of employees,” the company said.

For example, teams on Slack’s Plus or Enterprise Grid plans can now adjust posting permissions for channels in the app. This can allow admins to create specific announcement channels populated with thousands of users without the risk that salient company information will be drowned out in a din of posts from users.

“Granular controls over who can post in a channel keep surrounding chatter to a minimum, leaving the space clear for the most important updates,” an update from the company explained.

New APIs to automate boring admin

Slack will also soon roll out new APIs to help enterprise admins streamline and automate some of the common workflows for the messaging platform.

The APIs will allow admins to: create new workspaces and assign them a name, domain and description; assign members to workspaces without each individual needing to join themselves; invite guest accounts to specific channels; delegate admin responsibilities to particular members and automatically trigger all the aforementioned features based on information collected via web forms.

The APIs can also manage app approvals across all workspaces in a Grid organisation and can automatically approve or reject apps based on information. For example, if an organisation only uses a specific application to open its files, the new service will allow admins to automatically whitelist that application across all workspaces.

Users who want to figure out how to best leverage the new features are advised to visit Slack’s Help Centre to find instructions on how to create announcement channels and to visit Slack API to find out more about building bots personalised to suit your team’s needs.

Eva Short was a journalist at Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com