First-Day Checklist for a New Slack Workspace (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Do you have a brand new Slack workspace and you don't know what to do? I'll show you. Hello and welcome back to Slack School. My name is Mike Reynolds, I'm your host. I'm part of the Slack team here at Salesforce. And today we're gonna be talking about what to do with a brand new Slack workspace. I'm gonna pull up an org that I just created this morning and we're gonna look at things that you should be doing probably on that very first day, just to get the ball rolling. Of course, having a new Slack instance or really any type of enterprise grade technology, there's gonna be a lot of things to do and I can't cover all of that in one video. So we're gonna focus on three things. They're gonna pretty much apply to everybody. We're gonna talk about creating new channels and some channels that you should probably consider. We're gonna talk about building simple automations on top of those channels to kind of help you out and get you going. And then we're gonna wrap things up by looking at some different apps that you should definitely install. Let's dive in. Here's my brand new Slack workspace, still has that new workspace smell. That's a new workspace. So the first thing that we need to do in a new workspace is set up some basic channels. One of the most important things that we can do with channels is have a naming convention. So if you have a naming convention that you've used elsewhere in your company that a lot of people are comfortable with, don't reinvent the wheel, use that. If you don't, Slack's gonna offer up a suggestion for you. So we create new channels. I can hover over the word channels here. I get these three dots and then I can do create and create a channel. We give you some suggestions of three really common types of channels for help, project or team. There's a couple other prefixes that I really like. For example, temp, T-E-M-P, to show that something is temporary. That means we plan on archiving this as soon as we complete whatever the work is. Another one that is really good is E-X-T. Four channels that you know are gonna be external and you might wanna have a little bit of a nod to the users that are in there, just letting them know that this is a channel that is shared with some people who are outside of the company. For today, what I think we should all be doing, if you have a brand new workspace, there's a couple of channels that you're gonna wanna create. You probably need a project channel for deploying Slack into your company. So a good place to start is gonna be with a project channel. You can just type P-R-O-J for project. One thing you might wanna do is use capital letters and we do not allow that in channel names. If you try to type a capital, you won't be able to. I can type as much capital letters as I want and nothing's gonna happen. The other thing that you can't do is type a space. We will automatically replace that with a dash. So I'm just gonna call this Slack Launch. And we'll say that this is a private channel. Remember, private channels are not gonna be searchable by people who are not members of the channel. So if there are details, maybe the contract negotiation or whatever, any type of detail that I wouldn't wanna share broadly with everybody, I would use a private channel. So we're gonna use this as our example of a private channel. There's only one person in this workspace, which is the demo user and myself. So I'll just add the demo user into that and that's creating a channel. It's really pretty easy. Another channel that you're definitely gonna need and we'll spend more time on is a general help channel for Slack. So anytime we're deploying some new application, something as big as Slack, there are gonna be a lot of questions. And so we wanna give users a spot to go where we can help them in a dedicated location to answering and solving those questions. That'll also allow people to see other questions that have been asked and get an answer. And this is gonna be a nice public channel for us. So we've got help Slack, again, really obvious name. I'm not trying to make it complicated. You want your name and your naming convention to be such that I see it and I basically know exactly what I'm gonna find inside that channel. Again, we'll make this public. I want everyone to be able to see it. I don't need to worry about putting extra people in this channel yet. So here's my channel. With these general channels where we're getting help, it can be kind of terrible if people are just asking questions. We wanna provide some structure. So I'm gonna do a little bit of setup and then we'll see why. The first thing I wanna do is I wanna create a user group. I can do that by going to directories, clicking user groups, and then create user groups. I'm gonna call this the Slack help and we'll give it a handle of Slack help and team for helping with Slack questions. And I'm gonna leave channels blank for now. I'll click next. We do need to add a user in there. I'm gonna put myself and now we can go back to our help Slack channel. So a user group is just a collection of users that I can then do something with. And so what would I wanna do with this? I'll show you. What we wanna do is we wanna create a form so that people can ask a question in a structured way and then we post that structured question inside our help channel. So let's take a look at what that looks like. I'm gonna go to this plus sign, click workflow, and I'm gonna create a workflow from scratch. We're gonna choose a starting event and I'm gonna use from a link in Slack. And then what I wanna do is collect some information from my users. I'm gonna start off. We need to give it a title, say something basic. How can we help? We're gonna do a question and I always like to start with priority here. And we're gonna use dropdown. This is gonna give us a dropdown where users can choose from the options we give them. And so we just want a couple of example priorities that somebody might have. We'll say not urgent. And I can just hit enter to create another line. We'll say normal and urgent. Another thing I can do is add an emoji to kind of help give people a visual indicator. So I'll do that here. I'm just gonna start typing. When you put a colon, that allows you to do a shortcut. So I'm gonna say just the, I'm gonna start typing green. I'm gonna choose this green circle. In front of normal, we'll go with yellow. And in front of urgent, we'll go with red. So that'll give us some stoplight colors. I think a lot of people are familiar with that. After we get the priority, we just need to know how we can help. We'll keep this simple and we'll make this a short answer. And then we can save this form. So now I've got the simple form where they can tell me how urgent it is and then describe it. We now need to do something with that. Let's post a message to the channel. Here, I wanna actually be very specific. I want this to go into help Slack. So if somebody starts this workflow outside of our channel, I wanna make sure that we're pushing them back into the channel. And it's defaulted to give me this stock message. I actually don't want that. What we're gonna do is we're gonna leave priority and we're gonna say, I'm gonna say I have a new request from, and then we're gonna insert a variable. And I wanna say the person who submitted the form. And there's a little dropdown here. I wanna leave this at display name. What this is going to do is it's going to at mention the person so that they are directly connected to the request that they're making. That'll make it nice and easy for them to do this. If this becomes a very busy place, maybe you're onboarding tens of thousands of people into the Slack workspace. This could get very busy with people asking questions. So this will help give the user a direct tie back to their question. So we'll do this and we're just gonna leave priority right here on its own line. I'll add a line right here just so that that's kind of evident. And then we'll hit save. And then we're gonna add one final step to this, which is going to be to put what they've said into a thread. I really like this kind of approach where you're putting kind of a banner in the main channel and then you're immediately opening a thread and beginning to put the details in the thread. That helps keep the main channel really clean. And then the specificity is within the thread. So we can kind of watch the replies happen and we get this context of what happened. Here, we're gonna put the answer to how we can help. We can keep it simple and just put that in there. And this is actually perfectly fine as it is, but you know, we could do one thing more. How about we add a step that is a branch? So we're gonna say if the user picked urgent that there's an extra step that we wanna take, we'll set a color on this. So now if they happen to have selected urgent, why don't we at mention our help group just to make sure that they are drawn immediately to this? So we'll go back to a thread. We'll keep it at that same message. And we're just going to directly at mention our Slack help team. This is going to allow me to immediately draw attention when things are urgent. And if they're not urgent, I don't need to make a lot of noise about it. I can go ahead and click finish up. We'll call this the Slack help workflow. We'll say everyone can use it and click publish. We're gonna definitely select this channel help Slack and add this to the channel. When I go back and view my Slack help channel within the workflows, I can see this, but we could actually take an extra step of featuring this workflow. When we feature a workflow, when we come back to the messages tab, it replaces the send a message functionality with this big button for launching our workflow. I can still click here and send a message. And honestly, I don't want that. I don't want people to be able to click this send a message and actually send their own message. So I'm gonna change the posting permissions so that it's admins and specific people. And here are the specific people that I want. I want my Slack help workflow to be able to post into the channel. So we'll hit save. And now if I test this, we'll say that it's a normal priority. We'll create a great help ticket there. And now I can see I've got this post here. We have a new request. This is tagging me. It's a normal priority. I can also see up here in the threads where this is. And when I click on this, it has my message. Note, I did not get that Slack help. So let's do an urgent version of this. Now, because this is urgent, I should see a second message that is tagging my urgent users. So we'll see that additional reply. There it is. And now I've tagged this entire team that is doing this type of support. They're going to be tagged on this directly because it's urgent. The next thing we want to talk about is apps. There are so many apps that you can add into Slack that help make Slack a true work operating system. Let's take a look at that now. If I hover over apps and go over to more, I can choose manage and then browse apps. I can also view these in the Slack marketplace. When you look at apps, we've got a lot of featured apps. There's so many different things that you can do, but what I want you to do is come up to categories and start to think about it in terms of these different categories. There's two big buckets of places that you need to start. The first, what I'm going to call your tier one apps. You're always like, you must do this. It makes the most sense. There's no reason not to. If you've got CRM, we're going to set up Salesforce for Slack. That's a given. The other things that you want to make sure that you're doing are the tools that your folks are using literally every single day. Everybody's got email. Everybody's got a calendar. Everybody's got a drive. And you get those tools both with Google and with Microsoft. And believe it or not, all of those have apps that are native into Slack. So on the Google side, if we come up into collections, I've got Office 365, we'll start there. The Office 365 apps are going to let you take care of all of the big banner things that you need. The first, again, we've got that calendar. I want to be able to log in and then sync that Office calendar so that everything is just native. I don't have to flip or leave Slack for any reason. The updates on new meetings or my meeting reminders, those are all going to live natively in Slack with no issue. Then we've got the ability to send your emails directly into Slack. That's the Slack for Outlook integration. This is a great tool. Again, I really don't want to have emails at all. I'd like to replace all of that with communication and collaboration that's based natively within Slack, but sometimes I'm going to get emails and I'm going to need to do something with them. This is going to allow me to really, really work and reply to all those emails without, again, having to switch context or go and look for things. I can really easily work around that. And then the next big thing is, of course, storage. I'm going to want to set up my SharePoint and my OneDrive to make sure that all of those things are connected and that my search results in Slack are including things that are in my drive. Of course, a lot of us are using the Google workspace and Google's got the exact same set of tools. We're going to start with that Google calendar. I need the exact same syncing tools. I need to know when my meetings are. I need to get my reminders for meetings. And I don't want them to be outside of the tool that I'm working in. Just put all of those notifications inside of Slack and then turn them all off outside of Slack, right? I don't need to be notified twice. I just need the one. Of course, we can also have those emails be sent directly to Slack and then allow me to respond to all of those emails in Slack. This is a great way and a very simple way of keeping everything inside my work operating system and not having to switch applications all the time. And then of course, we're going to set up Google Drive. I know for me personally, I use the Google Drive all the time. The Google Drive app is really great because when somebody tags me in some document and they're like, hey, can you review this for me? I get a notification in Slack with a link to that document. I can even respond to their comment by just responding to the notification that I get in Slack. It's a really clean and simple way of just taking care of the things that I need to do in order to get my job done. The next tier of apps that you got to think about, I would look at this Essentials apps. There are so many different tools that sort of just like make life easy that live in Slack. When we think about the apps, when we think about Essential apps, one of the ones that I really want to highlight, there are a lot of apps that are really, really cool, but this RSS app, it's a sleeper. It's really, really neat. When you have an RSS key that you want to pay attention to, having the RSS app is great because it's going to allow you to pull these notifications that honestly were kind of hard to get and centralized, and then pull them into Slack so that I can immediately see and understand what they're doing. I absolutely love this one. And then of course, if you've got other types of storage tools, maybe you're using Box, maybe you're using Confluence, maybe you're using Git or Bitbucket, all of these tools are native inside of Slack, and it really, really helps keep everything together and simple, and it just makes it work. It's fantastic. Of course, one of the last things that we can always do when we're setting up a new workspace is ask Slackbot for help. There are so many different things that I could be asking, but a nice place to start is to just ask naturally, hey, I've got this brand new workspace. What should I be looking at? One of the things I love about Slackbot is that because it's integrated in it so simple into the platform, I can have Slackbot open on my side panel here, and then I can continue to navigate around and do things as I need with Slackbot in the side. So Slackbot's got all sorts of great tips for me, assigning admin roles, that makes a lot of sense, making sure that my team is in here, setting up Slack Connect if we're going to be using it, doing an introduction plan, setting up Slack Connect if we're going to be using it, doing an introduction plan. All of these things make a lot of sense, and Slackbot can help me manage all of that. Well, there you have it. Setting up a new Slack workspace is easier than you'd think. You've got your always-on AI agent for work, Slackbot, who's ready to help you. And if you ever need anything, you can always join us on the Slack community at slackcommunity.com, and just ask me. I'd be happy to help along with the rest of our team. Don't forget to like and subscribe, and we'll see you next time. And hey, great job today. New Slack workspace is a lot to tackle, but you're getting it. Woo. Oh yeah, that's an hour.