How to Connect Google Workspace Tools to Slack (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Do you want to see how easy it is to integrate the Google Workspace with Slack? Check this out. Hello and welcome back to Slack School. I'm your host, Mike Reynolds. I'm part of the Slack team here at Salesforce. Today we're going to be looking at how easy it is to set up your Google Workspace suite of tools into your Slack Workspace. We are going to look at three separate tools that are used by most of us. We're going to look at the calendar. We're going to look at the drive as a place to store files. And we're also going to look at setting up email. Let's get after it. Open up your sandbox and you can start by in the left down here in this apps section, we'll click on my apps. And this is going to show you all the apps that you have. The only app I've installed in this workspace so far is the Salesforce app and a lot of the apps that I want, they're going to be right here on top. So I'm just going to start from here. I could go to the marketplace and find the apps individually, search for them as well. I can search for an app directly up here, but I was going to install Google drive anyway. So let's just start. I'll click this install button. It's going to take me into Chrome, which is my browser of choice. And it's going to give me an overview of the app. So you can scroll through here and learn what the app is about. See some screenshots. I already know that I want this app. So I'm going to click add to Slack. On this page. There's a couple of things we want to take a moment just to make sure that we're doing them right. The first is your workspace. Now I do a lot with Slack and I logged into lots of different workspaces. I want to make sure that this is the workspace that I want. I've got other dev environments and the Slack community environment that I'm logged into. I'm not trying to install apps there. I want to put them in this workspace I've called new org. So that's the first thing I'm going to check when I come here. The next thing I want to do is I want to look at these app permissions. App permissions are going to show me exactly what this app is going to have the ability to do. So I can click on this and understand exactly the types of things that I will be granting access to if I were to go and install this app. The section I want to draw your attention to is actions that the, in this case, it's Google Drive. It's going to say the name of the app here. So it's the actions that the app can do. There are actions that it can perform specifically as me, or it could take actions as an app. And I can understand what those are. So if I look here at this bottom section, performs actions in your workspace, right? It's also setting the presence for Google Drive, understanding what that is. I can start a direct message and it can send messages as the app Google Drive. That seems very reasonable. And then it can perform some actions as me. So for example, if I tell the app to share a file, it can do that from my user. It can also add, edit, and delete remote files on my behalf. So basically it allows me to use Google Drive from Slack. All of these things make sense. I'm going to go ahead and click allow. Once I do that, I'm going to have to sign in and kind of say on the Google Drive side, yes, I agree to this. And that's what we're looking at here. I'm going to choose my test user. Now Google wants to allow Slack to do something, and it's going to verify this with me again. So I'm going to click continue. I can check specifically what level of access I want. I want all of this to happen. And again, make sure that you trust Slack. I certainly do. So I'm going to click continue. And I've installed the app and authenticated from Google into Slack, and it shows that I'm authenticated here. If I jump back to Slack, I'm going to go to my home tab, and I can see now that Google Drive shows up as an app. And when I click on it, it gives me some information and notifications here. What I can do is go to the home tab, and then I can manage the settings for the app from here. So this first one, understanding the way that I will get notifications. Now I personally like it that I get the notification in Slack, and then I turn off the emails that I would receive. And so that's kind of the bias that I have. So I want my notifications to be on. This button says turn off. So if I were to click it, it's going to flip to on. I want it to be set up so that I am receiving those notifications inside of Slack, and then I'll go into Google Drive and I'll turn the email notification off because I don't need that. Then I have file previews. Right now, this feature is also on, and I'm okay with that. I don't need to set up any of these admin options. If you want to go down a more formal process of setting up enterprise search, which if you're on an enterprise grade, I totally recommend that. You'll want to turn this on. So what I've done to test the preview of the file is I have a link to a file here, and I'm going to go ahead and just hit send. Because I've installed the Google Drive app into Slack, I'm getting a preview of what this link is actually showing me. I could click the link and actually go into Google Drive to take a look at this file, but I can see a preview of the file if I want. I can forward the file to somebody else. I can even have a conversation about this file. This is really great because if I do have something that I'm working on, maybe my team is working on the plans for TDX or we're working on really anything, maybe it's a presentation that I'm going to do at TDX and I want somebody to be able to review it for me, I can have a conversation about that file and everything stays succinct. It's a really easy way for me to actually collaborate around the thing that I'm using because that's kind of the point behind Slack. Slack becomes an operating platform or an operating system that I can use to work with my peers around the work that we're all doing together. I don't have to use a separate tool for that or three separate tools. Let's move on to Google Calendar. I'll go back to add apps and Google Calendar is this top app here, so I'll click install. This process is going to look very similar to what it did last time. What I can do is click add to Slack and I'm going to have a similar process. I want to verify the workspace that I'm in and we know that we can review the different permissions that are here. For now, we'll just click allow. Again, I need to choose the account that I'm going to set this up with. It's going to verify the amount of information that's being shared. I'll click continue. We'll grant access and then hit continue again. So now it's dropped me back in Slack and taken me to the Google Calendar app. One of the things that I would recommend everybody do as soon as you turn on your calendar is jump in here and open up your settings. So Google Calendar will give you a daily reminder of your schedule. If you don't want that, you can turn it off. Since this is a demo environment, I'm going to keep that turned off. I can also have a status sync. What I like about the status sync is that when I am in a meeting, it sets my Slack status to show that I'm in a meeting. So that's a really nice way. I don't have to babysit my status to be a good communicator with the rest of my peers. They can all just see that I'm in a meeting. So we'll turn that on. Then we have an out of office sync. Well, if I want you to know when I'm in a meeting, it'd be great if you knew when I was out of office on PTO. So we'll turn that on too. The next thing that we can do is look at some of the notification preferences. I can have Slack send me a notification with a link right there telling me what my meeting is, telling me how to join my meeting, and that can all be natively done in the platform. That reduces the noise from other applications that are also trying to let me know what announcement or what meeting I need to be in. But you might say, well, why would I turn this on in Slack when I could have it on just from the Google calendar? Well, I have lots of calendars, believe it or not. I have a personal calendar and I have a work calendar. Well, my Slack's actually giving me notifications for both of them, and that's really nice because I can set my notification preferences to turn off all notifications in one system by just turning them all off in Slack because no other systems give me notifications. I've turned all of them off. So it's my way of managing noise, but also making my life easy because I've centralized everything into my work operating system. Highly recommend that. Since I've set up Google calendar, I can now do more things with Slack bot. Check this out. This is great. I didn't actually have to do anything extra to enable Slack bot to be able to do this. And if you're wondering, can Slack bot check my Google drive? Yeah, absolutely. Of course. Adding your Google inbox is also pretty easy. We can do that now too. I'm going to go back to add apps and up here, let's just type Gmail. I've got the Slack for Gmail app. I'll click install. Here the process is a little bit different. I'll click add to Slack, but it's actually going to take me into the Google marketplace. Here the key piece of this is actually going to be installed into Google, not so much into the Slack app. So I'll click install and then I'm going to have a very normal Google app installation process. I'll identify myself, click continue, decide what access I want to grant and click continue. That's it. It's pretty easy. Now when I go look at my inbox, I need to refresh and I've got this notification that Slack has been installed. I can open up Slack and now once I have an email that I have an interest in moving into Slack, all I need to do is log in. So we're doing what we did before, but we're doing it in a different order. This time I still want to make sure that I'm looking at the right workspace and agreeing to the information here. I'll click allow. It's going to verify this. Every time I've done this, this page is not closed automatically. If I go back to my inbox, I can go back to the Slack app and now it's going to show me kind of a preview of what it would be delivering over to Slack. I can add a message to this if I want. This is my user and so that's the default, what I'm sending it to. I could pick a different channel or different people to deliver this message to, but for now I'm just going to hit send. So here I can see that message that was sent from Gmail into Slack. I can see the actual file and if I click on it, I can view this entire email. You may be wondering, well, why would I want my email to be in here? If I have the email in my inbox, shouldn't I just respond to it in my inbox? You certainly can if you're ready to respond. Sometimes though, the team needs to get together and we need to talk about how we're going to respond or how we're going to react to this. It's nice if everybody can see the thing and we can figure out how we should respond. And then I'll go back to my inbox and send that email when I'm ready. This helps cut down on that situation that happens when as a team, we receive an email, then we remove the customer from it, send 15 different emails back and forth to each other and then go back after a long discussion and then realize we actually left one email address for the customer in there and they've seen our whole conversation. Well, there you have it. Setting up your Google workspace to work in Slack is really easy and it's going to make you more productive. This is the whole point behind a work operating system. Take all of your different tools and expose them into your work operating system so that you swivel chair a whole lot less. Centralize your notifications and then turn them off where you don't want them so that it's easier to control everything from one spot. That's the vision of this wonderful work operating system that is the Slack platform. I hope you learned a lot today. Join us on the Slack community at slackcommunity.com and tell us what you thought or just say hi. We'll see you next time. Hey, good job.