Slack Connect demo: collaborate across workspaces (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Did you know that you can collaborate with other Slack users that aren't in your workspace? Watch this. 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 talking about Slack Connect. Slack Connect is a feature of all of our paid plans that allows you to collaborate natively inside of your own Slack workspace with somebody else who is inside their own Slack workspace. That makes things nice and easy because you stay right where you already are in the flow of work. They stay right where they are and you can share files together. You can have a huddle with the person. You can collaborate with them using any of Slack's basic features. Have a canvas, have a list, do your project management. The possibilities are endless. You might be wondering, why would I do this? Well, there are loads of reasons. Maybe you're like me and you were a consultant and while you were a consultant, you needed to collaborate with other people while working on projects. I did that for years. I also collaborate with my editor who doesn't work at Salesforce in Slack. He lives inside his Slack. I live inside mine. But the conversations that we have as teams, we share those. He actually is able to see the canvases that I use to make these episodes. I share those canvases with him. They contain files, videos, all sorts of different things. And he natively has access to all of it right inside of Slack. And I'm producing all of that content and giving it to him right inside of Slack. When you're using Slack Connect, you can very simply just connect with other Slack users and get the work done. So we're going to dive in and we're going to show you how this works and show you how you can control who has access to what and what connections are coming into your Slack. And if you need to not allow those connections, we'll take a look at that too. Let's get after it. To do this demo, we're going to try to keep it as simple as possible. Remember Slack Connect takes a channel that is shared between two separate workspaces. So we're going to have our first workspace on this computer. This is going to be our Salesforce computer. And then we have our second workspace on this computer. We're going to call that the Pronto computer. My user over here is called Slack Admin. My user over here is me. Let's get going. I've created a channel called Ext Slack Connect Demo. Of course, Ext is a good channel naming prefix that lets other people know that this is a channel that is external. In order to get somebody added in through Slack Connect, I'm going to click on my channel name, go to members, and then add people. Here, it's just checking to see, do you want to add them to this existing channel or a new one? I want to do the existing channel. And here, because they're not already a workspace member, I need to invite them. Once I've got them added, I just hit add. This is a person from an external organization, so we'll leave it set here. I'll choose next. I'm going to say that they can post and invite their colleagues. So I'll hit next. I can customize this and hit send invitation. That's all we need to do for now in our Salesforce org. So I'm going to move that machine over there. Excuse me, Nebula. I know that I've been invited to join a channel with another organization, so I'm going to start in my inbox. I've got this invitation. I'm going to click this accept invitation button. First off, I've got to choose which workspace I want to add this to. My Slack user might be associated with more than one workspace, so I've got to choose. I'll choose next. This is a private channel. It was set as a private channel in the owner org, so I can't change it to public. So I've got to leave it a private. I choose next. Here, I'm going to change this name. We'll call this demo one, and then I'll choose next. Here everything looks good, so I'm going to choose join channel. And here we go. I've got a message welcoming me to the channel, and it's clarifying that this is a channel from outside of my workspace. Now my user in this org is called Slack admin. So Slack admin can send a message, and if I go over here, I can see that Slack admin has sent this message. You also note that there's a little hover over here that shows me the name of the environment that this is coming from. So again, this is not inside of my own Slack, this person that I'm chatting with, so I've got to be able to flag that and show somehow. So you'll see that with a little hover over in the corner that also shows the brand logo of the Slack workspace that you're connected with. You can chat with multiple organizations in the same channel. The limit is actually 250, and that's quite a few. You might be wondering, what can you do inside one of these channels? Well, you can do anything that you would do in any of your channels. You can use your automations, you can use canvases, lists, you can share files, collaborate in threads, you can do whatever you need to do. Essentially, you can work right in the flow of work, even if you're working with someone who is not inside your company and at a different company working in their own Slack. So I've said that the workspace that created the channel has a bit more control over everything that's happening inside of it, but that doesn't mean that member workspaces have no control. They always have the ability to see what Slack Connect channels they have, and they can leave them if they don't want to be in them. Let's take a look at that now. Couple of quick things to look at. If we look at our channel sections, I have a new channel section called External Connections. All of your Slack Connect channels are going to live natively there. You can, of course, move them, but that's where they're going to start. Just like your Salesforce channels are going to live natively in Salesforce. If we want to take a look at what other Slack Connect channels we have, we can do that. I'll go to my Admin menu and then go to Slack Connect invites. Here I can see one from an earlier example I did and then deleted, and then I can see this one. Even though this was deleted, it still shows up. Here's the one that I just added. If I wanted to see just from a connections perspective, what other organizations am I connected to, I can see I'm only connected to Salesforce, and currently the connection has one channel in it, and that channel is private. If I want to disconnect this from my side, I can by clicking here and going to Disconnect, and it's going to say the name of the organization, so it's going to say Disconnect Salesforce in this instance, because that's the org I'm connected with. Well, there you have it. Slack Connect is a really easy way to collaborate with folks that aren't even in your own workspace, yet you get to use every feature that Slack has. It's really pretty amazing. If you've ever been a speaker at Dreamforce or TDX, you've been in one of these channels. You can bring hundreds of people, literally from hundreds of companies, up to 250 separate Slack workspaces can join together in one channel, and everybody can see the same thing, get the same information at the same time. It's a really, really powerful way to get work done. Let us know what you want me to do next time by jumping into the Slack Community Workspace at slackcommunity.com, join us in the Slack School channel, and give me a suggestion for an episode. You never know. You might win a huddle record. Until next time, have a good one. Oh, hey. You did a double good job today. You gotta be cool, okay? Don't walk on that computer. I'm using it.