Slack Unveils App Toolkit to Power Enterprise Workflows (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Good morning and welcome to SPEC 2019. On behalf of the entire Slack team, we're super excited to have all of you here. It's great to see such a diverse group of customers and partners from all kinds of companies, every vertical, every industry, and all corners of the globe. You're gonna be the first to see what we've been working on. We have a lot to show you, an amazing amount in fact. We want your feedback and input, that's why we're here. You're also here to learn from each other, partners and customers who are building on Slack. And I hope you'll have some fun doing it, I know I will. When the platform launched in December of 2015, this is the mission statement we put out. The Slack platform aims to make your experience with apps even better. That mattered to customers then, and it matters even more today. The average enterprise company uses over 1,000 different SaaS tools. Those specialized tools are very valuable. They make individual functions more productive, but they create challenges. The information that teams need can be buried inside your email inbox, hidden behind browser tabs, hard to find and even harder to act upon, and challenging for cross-functional teams to share. With Slack, these silos are eliminated. Apps in Slack make it easier for teams to access, share, and act on information. Slack makes teams more productive the more that people use it together with apps. In turn, people's experience with those software tools gets better, which makes the underlying software more valuable. Our mission hasn't changed. Whatever tools a company uses now or in the future, our objective is to make them better because that team uses Slack. Our platform helps customers get more value out of their software spend and out of their teams. And I'm excited to say that we're seeing that proven out in the data. 95% of app users in Slack say that the apps that they use help drive value of the underlying software and make it more valuable. That type of flywheel effect, apps making Slack more valuable, Slack making those apps more valuable, is what the flywheel effect is that fuels successful platforms. That's why we see such great participation in our platform. Over 600,000 active developers, many of you here today, are building on Slack. And over 90% of Slack's paid customers use apps and integrations every week. Developers have built over 1,800 apps in the app directory across the entire spectrum of software, every vertical, every field. In the past few months, we've seen significant additions in a number of key productivity tools. Whether you use one file provider or many, Slack makes it easier to find, share, preview files on Slack, whether that's from Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, SharePoint Online, you name it. New apps from Cisco WebEx, Fuse, and Zoom, and many others coming soon, make it easy for you to start and call natively within Slack. We've also seen apps that integrate some of the biggest names in enterprise software. A couple weeks ago, Workday released a set of apps that integrate several parts of their functionality. You can now file a time off request inside of Slack, you can file an expense report simply by uploading a receipt, and you can do an organization lookup, along with a lot of other functionality. Salesforce's new apps, released last week, allow teams to get custom personalized notifications on all types of sales objects, and rich previews of help desk tickets right inside of Slack. But our platform isn't just about integrations with global software leaders. We've seen incredible momentum for startups, companies that are building the next generation of enterprise leaders. Many of those are part of the Slack Fund. The Slack Fund is our early stage venture fund that backs the next wave of enterprise software. The fund also launched the platform in December of 2015. We've made 62 investments in Slack Fund companies. Many of you are here today, and lots of those companies have gone on to raise additional rounds. In fact, really outstripping, I think, all of our expectations, Slack Fund companies have raised over $600 million across the portfolio. Congratulations, that's really incredible. But our platform supports a lot more than just teams that are building apps for the directory. Many of you here are building solutions for your own teams. Slack customers now use over 500,000 custom applications every week. More exciting to me than the numbers is the stories about how deeply those apps are transforming work in your companies across all types of work. Apps that teams use to do anything, approve expenses, ship software, publish breaking news, collect payments, manage retail stores, produce television shows, coordinate travel, you name it, we can help you do it. We'll give you a few examples. Vodafone is the world's largest multinational telecom company, one of them. They serve over 500 million customers, and we've been helping them reimagine the Vodafone app so they can offer customers in all markets a more unified experience. Their DevOps group relies on our platform to maintain uptime, which is crucial to customer trust. Using apps by PagerDuty, Datadog, and custom apps they've built themselves, they can monitor and escalate incidents of the right teams within Slack within milliseconds of an incident. They've also built custom apps that integrate with AWS and other services so that engineers can spin up environments to production in 30 seconds. The result, they've cut mean time to resolution from 20 minutes down to five. All sorts of non-technical teams rely on Slack too. Let me give you an example that's near and dear to our hearts in our early mornings here at Slack, Joyride. Joyride is a beverage distributor out of New York. Previously, when a kegerator had a technical issue, and in the early morning, it's a coffee kegerator, don't worry, it was difficult for an on-call technician to get the info they needed to fix it quickly. So the technician would show up at a customer only to find out they had the wrong equipment. So they created the Equipment Service Bot. The Equipment Service Bot allows a sales rep to create a ticket within Slack, which automatically notifies the operations team by filling out a form. The sales rep can also add more details when they ask questions, including images of the equipment specifically. All the context the technician needs to solve the issue is right there in Slack. The results have been great. They've reduced their cost per stop by 60%. How about sales and marketing? Let's talk about HubSpot. HubSpot is a leader in sales and marketing software. They've scaled from 50 employees in 2008 to over 2,500 employees today in nine countries around the globe. Their sales teams rely on Slack to maintain speed and drive revenue, especially as the company scales. Traditionally, if a lead landed in a sales team's inbox, it might sit there for hours until somebody addressed it. The issue is, if prospects don't get a response within an hour or two, they're likely to move on. So sales reps started copying and pasting data between HubSpot and Slack. So they built an automation for their deal flows. Now, salespeople can create simple tasks in the HubSpot CRM, search contacts, and importantly, get notified of new opportunities even when they're out on the field. That allows them to stop copying and pasting data and spend their time on more valuable activities like closing deals. I love seeing these powerful examples of how teams have built custom apps to drive business forward. But traditionally, this is always required if you have to find a developer internally. We always got the request, please find a way to help us let non-technical users build simple solutions for their own teams so that you as developers could focus on creating more complicated applications. Till now, that wasn't possible. That's why last week, we launched the Workflow Builder. Workflow Builder is a visual no-code tool that allows any user in Slack to build custom workflows, automating routine processes right in Slack, enabling your customers who don't code to solve simple problems for themselves so that you don't have to. You can create all types of workflows. You can do things like automate your team's weekly standup, introduce a new member to a channel by making sure they read the right documents and they fill out a form introducing themselves, or simplify brainstorming by creating a form. All of that takes just minutes. You select a trigger, add a few steps, and publish right from Slack. But this is just the start. Coming soon, you can connect workflows to incoming webhooks from external services. Many of you use webhooks today for simple notifications, but imagine how much easier it would be if the equipment on a factory floor that threw an alert went into an ops maintenance channel or the social media mention that the marketing team needs to address gets their attention in the marketing team channel. Webhooks plus workflows make it easier for teams to decide the right workflow for a particular issue. And teams can change them anytime, no code needed. To learn more, please join the Workflow Builder team downstairs today at 12.45 to get a sneak peek at what's coming next. When we started the platform in late 2015, Slack was also just getting started. And we have grown. At that point in time, Slack was hitting about a million daily active users. We're over 12 million daily active users today. Slack's growth is about real usage. People and teams engaged in Slack every day. Slack's open about nine hours on average on people's desktop and on their phones. People are actively using it for 90 minutes a day. And they perform over five billion actions in Slack every week. Writing messages, reading messages, sharing files, commenting on files, doing searches, and importantly, interacting with all the apps and integrations that you've built. Basically doing all the things you need to do to move business forward. That growth is also diverse. Half of Slack's users are now outside the United States. Our users span over 150 countries. And over half of our users are in non-technical roles. Every type of work. Salespeople, marketing, public relations professionals, chefs, journalists, dentists, public servants, all kinds of people in every kind of company. From startups to the largest enterprise companies in the world. Over 65 of the Fortune 100 are paid customers of Slack. Companies in every vertical, including highly regulated industries like financial services and government institutions. We also know that collaboration doesn't stop though at the walls of your company. That's why shared channels matters. Shared channels lets two separate organizations work together. Each from the comfort and security of their own Slack workspace. Bringing the alignment and productivity that Slack brings to their own teams to cross-company collaboration. We've seen great adoption of shared channels. Over 20,000 paid customers are using shared channels and that number grows every day. This matters to developers. When we ask users, 57% of them tell us that they discover new apps by seeing them being used. Shared channels can be a powerful tool to unlock network effects for applications. Someone sees the app, they understand how it's used in context and they see how it helps get work done. To learn more, visit our shared channels booth just outside the room. They'll answer your questions. You can also ask for an enterprise grid sandbox to test out shared channels. This is our mission, it's still our mission. We wanna make it easier for any user to use any tool and make it more effective in Slack. We have a long way to go. We're really proud of the momentum that we're seeing. 1,800 apps in our directory, 500,000 custom apps used every week. But we're a lot further that we can go together. Back to the start of the platform in December of 2015. When we launched, we wanted to make it easy to get started. So we started with technologies that were easy to use. Webhooks, slash commands, chatbots. At that time, Slack was also just getting started. Our user base was largely technical. That openness invited experimentation. Today though, with over 12 million daily active users and the majority of those being in non-technical roles, users' needs have changed. We've made some progress. Our platform has evolved. We've added more interactive components, buttons, menus, dialogues. At spec last year, we added message actions. And at Frontiers back in the spring, we showed you how to build with BlockKit. But you need more. You need more capabilities from our platform to make apps easy for everybody. We need to provide you with a better toolkit. Users want it to be easier to discover, understand, and use apps. You all want that too. You also asked us for a clear path. What's the best way to build an app? So today, we're doing something about it. About all of it. To show what we're doing, please join me in welcoming to the stage our Director of Product Management, Ellie Powers.

[00:14:08] Speaker 2: Hi, everybody. I'm Ellie Powers, and as Brian mentioned, I'm a Director of Product here on the platform team at Slack. And I joined Slack over a year ago this month. And before that, I worked on some other developer platforms over at Google on Android, Google Play, and Chrome. So Brian told you about how Slack has evolved over the years. And I want to talk to you a little bit about how Slack has evolved over the years. So let's talk a little bit about how Slack has evolved. And how our platform needs to change as well. So, what's that next step that Brian's been hinting at? I am very happy to announce today the new Slack App Toolkit. It's the way to be able to build great apps on Slack. It's got some familiar parts in it, and we have some announcements coming up today as well. The toolkit has four different components. The permissions model, our UI, and the user interface. The permissions model, our UI framework block kit, surfaces where you can build, and actions. Let's get started with the foundation, the permissions model. So to tell you about the issue that we're addressing, I want to start by talking about one app, Polly. Polly is a very popular polling app. And to be able to have their app talk to users and channels, they have to request the bot token. And when a user installs Polly in a workspace, they'll see this screen right here. And if you're security conscious, you're going to read this screen really carefully. And you'll notice that the bot token is granting Polly access to do a wide variety of different things on Slack. Even though they might not actually need all of this access. So, Polly didn't have a way to be able to do what they wanted to do with users and channels without requesting this broad bot token. And that's been pretty tough for some of their customers. So today, we're announcing a new model for app permissions, granular permissions. You'll be able to request just the access to the information you need and nothing more. Granular permissions will also bring you more reliability and help you get more adoption in enterprises. Here's what a user will see with granular permissions. You can see that Polly is no longer requesting the broad bot scope. Instead, they're just requesting the individual scopes that they actually need. We've also redesigned this UI that a user sees when they're installing an app. You can see exactly what an app can view and do in a workspace. And as you can see here, Polly is not asking for access to be able to read the channel message history. So to talk more about the impact of granular permissions on Polly, let's bring out their CEO, excuse me, CTO, Bilal Ejazi. Hi, Bilal.

[00:16:50] Speaker 3: Hey.

[00:16:50] Speaker 2: So could you tell me a little bit more about what Polly does?

[00:16:53] Speaker 3: Sure. Polly's mission is to help teams measure and understand their work. At its most basic level, that translates to polls. But for many customers, it extends to scenarios like stand-ups, pulse surveys, sprint retros, and more. Our power users actually use Polly to do a lot more than just measure and understand their work. They actually use Polly to do a lot more than just measure and understand their work. So Polly's mission is to help teams measure and understand their work. At its most basic level, that translates to polls. At its most basic level, it extends to scenarios like stand-ups, pulse surveys, sprint retros, and more. Our power users actually trigger powerful server-based workflows by connecting Polly to apps like Jira, ServiceNow, Workday, and Opsini.

[00:17:28] Speaker 2: Tomorrow, my co-founder is actually giving a talk on how one enterprise, Intuit, is using data for granular permissions. Can you tell us more why this is interesting to you?

[00:17:35] Speaker 3: Yeah, we're actually one of the oldest apps in the Slack ecosystem. And over the past four years, we've seen a steady uptick in the security requirements of our customer base. We've done work like implementing a robust security program and achieving SOC 2 certification to try and ameliorate some of that. But the best way to secure data is to just have less of it. And we've always known that BotScope is more than we need to provide the services that we do. And we'd love to lower that barrier of entry to folks that are coming in.

[00:18:03] Speaker 2: And you've been spending a lot of time working with administrators and talking through their security concerns. Could you share a little bit more about exactly what gets them worried?

[00:18:11] Speaker 3: Yeah, there's basically two things that administrators worry about, the data that you have access to and how you're securing it. And those concerns translate into security reviews, which are a pain both for the app developer as well as for the customer. We can go through security reviews faster by doing things like SOC 2 and having that security program. But what would be better is if the scopes that we're requesting provide enough comfort and safety to allow somebody to install the app without a security review or with a substantially reduced security risk. Additionally, there's enterprises that won't install anything with a BotScope. And more granular permissions will enable them to jump into the water as well. Ultimately, we believe that granular scopes will help more people experience Poly with less administrative work, both for Poly as well as the customer. And that's the kind of win that can drive this ecosystem forward.

[00:19:05] Speaker 2: That's great. And so I bet there's a lot of developers who are in the audience today and are thinking about, should I think about making that move to granular permissions? How much work is that going to be for me? What advice could you offer them?

[00:19:17] Speaker 3: Yeah, the transition is actually really simple. You just have to change your URL that you're hitting for OAuth from v1 to v2 and request the scopes that you need. That's it. Finding out what scopes you need is actually really simple as well. You just do a quick audit of what APIs you're using and map those back to the scopes that you need. So it should be a relatively simple change and a big win for your app.

[00:19:38] Speaker 2: That's great. All right. Well, thanks, Bilal.

[00:19:41] Speaker 3: Thank you.

[00:19:41] Speaker 2: It's been great as having Poly as one of the first developers building on granular permissions. And there's one more fun fact I wanted to share about granular permissions. If you want to make sure that your app stays installed when the original person who installs an app leaves that workspace, granular permissions can do that too. Granular permissions is available for all new apps now. And coming up later, you will be able to move your apps over so you can start planning that work today. Now let's talk about what else it takes to get your app installed in an enterprise. So enterprises often have users requests to install new apps get reviewed by an administrator. And they use the UI that you can see here. And if you have a big organization with a lot of different people and a lot of different apps and a lot of requests, that means that process of getting that request approved is not an instantaneous process. So we release some admin APIs and policies to be able to automate what administrators are doing already. So with these, admins can create rules to speed up their work. They can approve or restrict certain scopes or apps. They can forward requests to an existing ticketing system. And they can even compare requests against a database to see if the security approval already exists for the app that's been requested. And as we think about next year, we're going to be giving even more thought to what else we could do to make apps easier to use in the enterprise. So to summarize, the new permissions model gives you access to just the information you need for your app and nothing else. Moving to granular permissions is going to put you in a great position to be able to adopt other features that Slack is working on, too. Next, let's talk about our UI framework, BlockKit. We launched BlockKit earlier this year to make it easy to build great UI on Slack. And before BlockKit, we had a pretty limited set of building blocks. So the app guru needed to create an information-dense message. And with what we originally provided, this was the best we can do. But here's what Guru could build with BlockKit. As you can see, it's much easier to read and it's also easier to interact with. For example, if I need to create a new card, I can just click right here. And there I go. And BlockKit is a set of all the building blocks that you see here. We have a wide range of blocks. And you just stack these pieces together to create rich, interactive, attractive, and easy to read user experiences. And this year at our Frontiers Conference, we asked all of you, which block should we be building next? And the lucky winners are everything that you see here on the right. We have a bunch of new blocks coming today that are available today. We have the input and the multi-line input. We have the multi-select block. We have radio buttons. And we'll have checkboxes coming soon, too. So if you're interested in seeing what we do after this, please come outside this room to the roadmap voting wall. And you'll be able to let us know which blocks you'd like to see soon. BlockKit also makes it much simpler to design a Slack app. We launched the BlockKit Builder. It's a WYSIWYG tool to rapidly prototype Slack apps. The BlockKit Builder comes preloaded with a bunch of different app templates. You can think about things that are common to a lot of apps, things like search results or approval flows. So what you do is you boot up BlockKit. You pick a template. You make a few tweaks, copy and paste the JSON into your app, and you're ready to go. Building UI becomes much simpler with the Builder. So BlockKit helps you build great apps. We have a lot of new blocks available today. And we'll have checkboxes coming soon, too. And our BlockKit Builder has been updated to reflect everything that you're going to be seeing today. Now let's look at the surfaces where people build with BlockKit. People are already seeing BlockKit in Slack messages. But today, we're announcing two new places where you can build with BlockKit, two new surfaces. The first one is modals. They're available now. Modals are windows where you can open them to display and collect information. Slack had previously offered dialogues, but they were pretty limited in functionality. With modals, we've added BlockKit. They can update dynamically. And you can chain them together for multi-step experiences. To show you what's possible with modals, please join me in welcoming to the stage Giacomo De Gregoli and Kitty Chen.

[00:24:22] Speaker 4: Good morning. Hi, I'm Giacomo De Gregoli. I joined the Slack platform product team about a year and a half ago. And the first product I worked on was BlockKit, which was an incredibly exciting time to be part of the platform team. But even more exciting has been to see all of the incredible experiences that you all have built using BlockKit.

[00:24:40] Speaker 5: And my name is Kitty Chen. I lead App Experience Team at Slack. And I'm the co-founder and CEO of BlockKit. And I'm here to talk about how you can build with BlockKit, how you can build with BlockKit, and how you can build with Modals. So I'm very excited to be here today to talk about how you can build with BlockKit. And I'm also the co-founder and CEO of the App Experience Design Team here at Slack.

[00:24:58] Speaker 4: I've had the pleasure of designing BlockKit as well as help bring the components into brand new surfaces like modals. Today, we're going to show you what you can use modals to build a robust workflow. So let's go ahead and show you that. All right, let's jump right in. First, we're going to show you an app that was recently introduced using the BlockKit Builder. What you're seeing on screen is the Bridge app. Bridge is an information management learning tool built by our friends at Instructure. It allows users to search and enroll for courses when they're ready and motivated to learn all inside of Slack. What you're seeing on the screen is the welcome message that was implemented for Bridge, which includes a button to search the library. So let's go ahead and do that. Great, here you're seeing the first thing that we're incredibly excited about, a search input box that's come up in a modal. This wasn't possible before BlockKit and modals. Search is a great way to gather contextual information about what your users are trying to find. That's why we're incredibly excited to announce that we are launching a new text input block as part of our BlockKit component library. So let's say I'm looking for an SQL course. I'll go ahead and type in SQL, and I will click search. Great. This is the second thing we're incredibly excited about with BlockKit in modals. You can see that you are now able to stitch together multiple modals inside of your Slack experience to create a deeper, richer experience for your users. So let's say I was looking for an SQL course. I'm interested in this first one. This kind of looks interesting. I'll click enroll. Great. I'm taking a look at this information, and let's say this course is actually a little bit basic, pun intended, so I'd like to go back and refine my search results. I'll hit close, or you can modify that to say back. And that's the third thing that we're also incredibly excited about. I love how Bridge has built the option for users to move back and forth using view stacking so that you can refine your search results to find exactly what you're looking for. In this case, let's say I'm looking for an advanced SQL class. I'll click enroll. Looks pretty good. I'll click okay. And that's it. In a matter of minutes, I was able to search for, see search results, and enroll in a course, all without having to leave Slack. Pretty cool, huh, Katie?

[00:27:24] Speaker 5: Yeah, absolutely. Adding multi-step workflows like this into your app is actually quite simple. I'd love to show you how to get started. Chakamur, boot up the BlockKit Builder.

[00:27:34] Speaker 4: All right, you got it.

[00:27:36] Speaker 5: Here we go. This is the BlockKit Builder, a tool for you to visualize your designs before you implement them. This is exactly what the Bridge team did when they were marking up their designs. They put everything in the Builder, and they understood where they could hook up to their service. On the left side, you can see the BlockKit components. You can switch between message and modal view to understand what components are available in which view. In the middle is a preview of your designs, and on the right side is the JSON that you can edit as you go. So now you know what the Builder looks like. Let's see if we can recreate that course list we just saw in the Bridge. The easiest way to do this is to start with a template. So let's go ahead and click select a template. Cool. As Elia said, we've made lots of templates for you to help you get started. So let's see what we can find that's gonna work for us.

[00:28:33] Speaker 4: Cool. Search results. These search results here?

[00:28:35] Speaker 5: I feel like that one's pretty good. Okay. Let's go with it.

[00:28:38] Speaker 4: All right.

[00:28:40] Speaker 5: Now, by selecting the template, it's immediately populated in the Builder, and we can start making changes. The wonderful thing about BlockKit is you only have to design it once, just like what we're doing here today, and we'll help you automatically scale across iOS and Android so you don't have to worry about mobile designs or mobile code. Now, to make changes, you can add new blocks or by simply dragging and dropping the blocks around. This is new. Now, if we want to make changes to, let's say, the text, we edit that in the JSON. So...

[00:29:14] Speaker 4: All right, I'm gonna change this choose button.

[00:29:17] Speaker 5: Okay.

[00:29:19] Speaker 4: How's that?

[00:29:21] Speaker 5: Oh, thanks, Jacobo. Now, to, let's say we want to change the state of this button, we can also do that in the JSON. So... Let's see what Jacobo comes up with. Ah, there you go. We only have to change it from default to primary to change the state of the button. Now, as you can see, the change is reflected immediately in the preview, and what I usually do is keep editing and previewing changes as I noodle on some ideas. Now, in the interest of time, let's switch over to an edit version that we did earlier. Now, this is how I usually use the Builder to work through the sequences between messages, modals, multi-step modals. I stage each one of them across the tabs and think about how to weave them together, making adjustments to make sure it flows nicely. Now, this is looking really great. I think I'm ready to send it to my team. Now, to do this, all I have to do is copy that link on the top and send it to them. When they click on it, they're brought to this exact instance in the Builder, and they can see exactly where I left off prototyping.

[00:30:24] Speaker 4: And that's the best part about the Block Kit Builder, isn't it, Katie? Yep. Not only does it look great across all surfaces, but it helps shrink the amount of time from design ideation to implementation.

[00:30:38] Speaker 5: Now, that's right. You can start adding modals to your apps today. I'd love to tell you more about how to do this, so come check out my talk tomorrow at 11.45 on building out rich app experiences. All right, that's all from us. Back to you, Ellie.

[00:30:56] Speaker 1: Thank you. Great talk. This was a really great talk. Thank you.

[00:30:59] Speaker 2: Thanks, Katie and Giacomo. I can't wait to see their session tomorrow. Now let's look at what else you can build with modals. Qualtrics here helps organizations create and disseminate surveys within organizations. They've been using modals here for the input, and the user can complete the entire flow of sending out that survey without having to leave Slack. No more bouncing out to different websites. Next up, Streak. It's a tool for accelerating your sales pipeline. Here they've created a flow all contained within Slack to be able to update sales opportunities. Again, they're using modals with a wide range of input types and display types to be able to update complex sales opportunities. Oftentimes there's many parameters to configure, and they can even provide a custom confirmation screen at the end. So that's how you create deeply interactive experiences in Slack with modals. But how does a user get into that experience? People need a really consistent place where they can see everything that an app can do and get started. So today we are announcing your app's new home in Slack. The app's home tab is a place that's personalized to the user with detailed information, and the user won't need to be able to do anything hard to use the app. They just go here. They won't have to remember a complex slash command or learn how to chat with a bot in a channel, unless they're into that sort of thing, of course. And here's Google Calendar's app home. It's built with BlockKit. Here you can see my daily schedule. You can see all of my meetings. There are even buttons to be able to join the Zoom calls and dial into my meetings. And this app was already providing notifications to users around things like new events coming up or meeting conflicts, and that information will continue to be available up there in the Messages tab. And if I want to see who's coming to this one particular meeting today, I just click here and out pops a modal. It's got a list of all the people invited to the meeting there, a link to the agenda and the notes, information about the dial-in information. It basically, as a user, it's really easy to use and it's everything that I would expect to see and need to get my work done with my calendar. We'd love to show you more about what's possible with the app home, so don't miss the workshop tomorrow in the build track. So here are all the interactive surfaces where you can build with BlockKit. Finally, let's talk about how a user gets work done in Slack. If you think about what your app does, it probably allows the user to complete a series of tasks or actions within Slack, and we want to make those actions, those simple shortcuts, easy to find no matter what context the user's in in Slack. Last year, we launched the first type of actions, actions from messages. So if I'm here reading a message in Slack, I can attach this message to an Asana task, a Jiric ticket, a PR with Bitbucket, et cetera. But people want to kick off actions no matter where they are, not just when they're looking at a particular message. And that's why I'm excited to announce actions from anywhere. People will be able to use actions in Slack no matter where they are. Actions will be highly visible, and they'll feel as natural to the Slack experience as channels or DMs. Actions are simple to define. Each action contains simply the name of the action, an optional request URL, a short description, and a callback ID. You build an action just one time, and then people will be able to find it in the context they need throughout the Slack experience. You can link actions and modals to build user flows. So here, a user triggers the action from a Slack UI. It opens a dynamic modal that the user can complete. Then the information is sent to your server, and the user sees a dynamically updated confirmation message. So that's actions. Your app contains a simple set of shortcuts that get work done for users. And they'll become available throughout the Slack UI too. So we've talked through what you, the developer, can build with the new Slack App Toolkit. Now let's talk about things from the user's perspective and what's new there. For a person who's new to Slack, apps are not easy to find or use, right? And our research has showed that most people who use Slack and aren't using apps yet are on a team that already has many apps installed. So you've done that hard work as a developer of getting your app installed onto the team. Now I want to show you some early concepts, some previews, into what a user will be able to see and what we're going to be able to bring those apps right in front of users. So as you're here during this conference, please also give us your feedback on these ideas. Again, I said these are early, and so we want to be able to use your feedback to refine what we're doing. Okay, so let's say I'm a new user, and I've just joined this team, and I want to know what apps I should be using. So I'll just click over here into the newly redesigned App Launcher. At the top, I see the apps that are already installed on my team. And then at the bottom, I can see some other apps that are being recommended to me, and if I want, I can click to install them. So I decide I want to go to Google Calendar to see what's coming up for me today, so I click on it, and with that click, I jump from the App Launcher right into the App Home. And here I am on the Google Calendar App Home. You can see my schedule for the day, my Zoom links, and so on. So people will be able to find your apps in the launcher, and then jump quickly into your App Home. And App Home is how I see the entire Google Calendar app. But what if I just need to get one specific thing done really quickly? Let's say I need to submit an expense report. So I go to the quick switcher, and I start typing what I want to do, submit expense. And then it'll search through everything, all the messages, all the actions, and find what I'm looking for. And there it is, Submit Expense Report. I don't even need to know the name of my company's expense software in order to be able to find what I need and get it done. So Actions makes it much easier for people to discover your app. And when I click on that expense action, it opens up that modal again. I enter all the details of the expense report that I'm looking to submit. I don't have to leave Slack at all. And we'll be adding a new menu available from anywhere in Slack that I can use to find actions. The concept that we're looking at is just one idea of what it might look like. So let's say I'm in a channel, and someone's asked about our vacation policy. I open the new menu, and I use the Post Knowledge Card action. I can then use this action to search our internal knowledge base, find the answer, and post it back into the channel. And here, I was able to use actions to quickly get work done without having to switch context. Next, let's say that I lost my phone, and I need to get some help. So I go to Ask for Help in the IT Help channel. I notice that there's a new menu in this channel, too. You'll be able to pin relevant actions to a channel, just like you can already pin relevant files or messages. So here, I see some IT Help related workflows and actions, and I find what I need, Report Lost Phone, and I can click on it. So these new user experiences that we've just walked through are gonna be coming soon, and we're really focusing on how to make it easier for users to find and use new apps. Okay, that's it. We've made it through. Today, Slack is announcing the Slack App Toolkit. It's a happy path to build engaging apps that work for any customer. We talked about a lot of different improvements, and so, let's focus on what you should do first. So, first, adopt granular permissions. It's now an open beta, and it's a great way to gain points with security-conscious customers. Next, check out the updated Block Kit Builder and all of our new blocks. Third, start building with modals. They're now generally available, and start working with the App Home, which is now in beta. These are focused on building richer experiences. And finally, actions. We'll be rolling out new touchpoints early next year, and it's a great time to start thinking about what shortcuts you'd wanna build for your app. Together, these changes are going to make your users much more easily able to find your apps and to figure out how to use them and get work done in Slack. And now, we're so excited to see what you're going to build with all these new tools. And to further set yourself up for success, a great way to do that can be to work more closely with the global Slack community. And to tell you more about that, please welcome to the stage our Director of Developer Relations, Bear Douglas.

[00:39:59] Speaker 6: Hi, everyone. Hi, I'm Bear, and I lead our Developer Relations team. We've covered a lot of ground this morning. There are major new features and updates to our platform. And as we continue to evolve what the platform can do, we're also invested in helping you succeed as a Slack developer long-term. So what does that mean, succeed? Well, we've seen from the customer stories that we've had with our customers that they're not necessarily the best developers. They're not necessarily the best developers. They're not necessarily the best developers. Well, we've seen from the customer stories that Brian shared earlier in the keynote, and many more like them, that you are already materially changing the way work is done around the world. But you told us that there was more that we could do to help. In a study of Slack developers that we conducted earlier this year, we saw three major themes emerge. You want to be able to share knowledge and ideas, get advice, swap best practices, and get credit for what you know about the Slack platform in a community that feels like you belong. And when we say community, we don't mean 30 different meetup groups spread across 15 sites, some forums that may or may not be official. We mean capital C community, backed by Slack, where you have our support and dedicated spaces to learn from one another. So that's why in March, we launched the Slack Platform Community, or SPC. SPC is a global volunteer-run community that's for developers, designers, builders, anyone who's passionate about building the future of work on Slack. SPC chapters are where people come together to learn from each other, to stay up to date on the recent Slack Platform announcements like everything we've talked about this morning, and to share their expertise in their hometown on a regular basis instead of just once a year at a conference. And since March, the momentum that we've seen you create is amazing. In a few short months, SPC has grown to over 63 cities in 31 countries, from Kampala to Barcelona, Islamabad to Sydney, Vancouver to Sao Paulo. And these in-person communities are led by a founding group of chapter leaders. They've dedicated their time and expertise to building out their own local communities to suit the business landscape and the work norms of each location that they're in. And I know we have a few of our chapter leaders here today. So could you please stand up if you're a chapter leader for SPC? Come on. I know you're here. Thank you. Thank you so much. And to hear a little bit more about the program, please welcome Elizabeth Kinsey, our Slack platform community global lead, and Rhea Retta, the co-founder of Toast and the co-lead of SPC San Francisco.

[00:42:25] Speaker 7: ♪♪ Thanks, Rhea. Hi, Rhea. Hi. It is spectacular to talk with you today. So before we get started talking about community, tell me a little bit about Toast.

[00:42:41] Speaker 8: Sure. So Toast is a productivity app for engineers to unblock their teammates and stay focused on objectives. It's become a vital part of the workflow for many teams and it keeps them healthy and happy.

[00:42:53] Speaker 7: Sounds pretty awesome. I know when you were starting to build Toast is kind of when you started to get involved with the community. And it was the first time that you'd been involved with a community like this. What got you motivated to apply to lead a chapter?

[00:43:08] Speaker 8: Well, for me, it was the first time I really felt connected with the community. I'm the type of engineer that goes on Stack Overflow, go on developer subreddits, API docs and help threads. And it's always been very intimidating for me to ask questions. Some engineers can be very hypercritical. And so when I started out building the Toast prototype, it was sort of a journey that felt very alone for me until I found the Slack community. And it was really fun. The people there were very friendly, including all of the Slack platform engineers. And that was really awesome. I think during that time, we ended up just observing other people pair programming, debugging together. And it was a really great experience. I learned a lot. I helped other people, other founders, other makers. And in general, it was just a very encouraging experience. And I really wanted to take that and bring it to the local community and inspire more people.

[00:44:04] Speaker 7: I love how you went from engaging with people online to taking that into an offline arena and being able to meet up with people and talk about the solutions and challenges in real life. Tell me a little bit about what it was like to get started building your chapter. Has anything surprised you?

[00:44:26] Speaker 8: Yeah, so all of the other chapter leaders were really great. It was really cool to connect with another group of passionate people that were passionate about building community. We all share resources, so all of the talented folks all over the different communities, we're learning from all of them at the same time. So that was really great. And I was also really surprised with the amount of support we got from Slack, given that this is a community-driven objective. You yourself, Elizabeth, you were really helpful for us. You were there for the ins and outs of the SF chapter, and you helped us with the tiniest roadblocks, and it's really awesome, because you don't have to do this alone.

[00:45:07] Speaker 7: I love that. Well, I love helping you all and all of the chapter leaders, and I think that that is a really good point that you made. My favorite thing about community and finding other people is that you aren't alone anymore. When you were interviewing, you said something to me along the lines of, you know, there are mobile app developers and there are web app developers, but I'm a Slack app developer, and I want to find my people. And I'm so glad that you did. So tell me a little bit about what it's like to be in your local chapter.

[00:45:38] Speaker 8: Yeah, so what's amazing about the chapters is that every chapter is different, and we definitely try to cater to our local communities. And in SF, we have a lot of founders, so we definitely have a very startup vibe going on with our chapter. So we've had everything from teams at Slack giving presentations on how to get your app featured on the marketplace, how to show off in the app directory. We've had successful founders talk about building their brand, giving technical talks on app security. And we've talked about multiple ways to prototype your first bot. So in general, it's pretty cool because we try really hard to cater to our local chapters, and we really look for that feedback. So in the future, we might have anything from design to business growth, anything from there. So we're really trying to build events that we want to go to.

[00:46:36] Speaker 7: I think that you are doing a very good job building events that not just you, but a lot of people want to go to. So please continue doing that. One thing that I am interested in is a lot of people, when they are thinking about getting involved, and it's their first time, have some hesitancy. So what would you say to someone who is maybe thinking about leading a chapter in their hometown or even just joining one that already exists if they were on the fence?

[00:47:05] Speaker 8: Well, I would say don't be on the fence. There is no fence. I really feel like this community, especially, is really inclusive. I really kind of wish I put myself out there sooner. So it's really a great experience. In general, as a chapter leader, you get to be the conduit between Slack and the larger community. So you get the pulse on what's new at Slack first, and you also learn from so many different people across the many communities at the same time. And it's so important to learn and iterate. And on top of that, I'm sure, it's important to have these communities and leaders that can speak for them. And it's as important for Slack as it is for us. So it's a very valuable experience.

[00:47:51] Speaker 7: It is definitely important for us. I know that we've gotten some really valuable feedback from in-person events. But also, it's just really fun to see all of the ways that Slack builders are figuring out how to build that are things that maybe we didn't even think about. Before we let you get back to spec, anything else you want to add for our crowd here?

[00:48:13] Speaker 8: Yeah, all of you should join us. Go to slackcommunity.com and find your local chapter. If there isn't one, don't be shy about creating one. Awesome. Thank you so much, Ria. It was so good to chat with you today.

[00:48:25] Speaker 7: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Back to you there.

[00:48:33] Speaker 6: Thank you so much, Elizabeth and Ria. It's really exciting for us to hear that through SPC, people are making powerful business connections through these informal networks that you create when you show up to some of the meetup groups. But we haven't provided a formal mechanism for you to show what you know and how to build amazing Slack apps, or if you're also an admin, how to manage them at scale until today. So say hello to our new certification program for Slack developers and admins. Yeah, this is exciting. Yeah. This program is going to make it possible for you to become certified as a Slack admin or developer, meaning that you've demonstrated the knowledge and the skills that you need to either manage Slack apps or build amazing ones for any organization. The Slack certified program is going to feature courses where you are able to meet people like you, a study guide to make sure you're prepared, and an exam to prove that you're certified. You can sign up today to get certified in person in New York City or in Vancouver, Canada, and more cities are going to be announced soon. And watch out for online courses and examinations coming in 2020. So no matter your role in the company, if you're invested in changing the way that we work together, you belong here. And you have some options for how to get involved. If you're interested in joining or leading an SPC chapter, please join us tomorrow for a mini community meetup at lunchtime downstairs, where we're going to hear from current SPC leads and then also connect with people who might have similar interests to you. To connect with the global community online, both at the conference and after it wraps, you can join the Slack community workspace. You should have an invitation in your inbox from earlier in this week, and we've seen some of you have already joined the channel and started the conversation. So we'll be distributing some of the content for the build track, the workshop track, in that workspace. So join the workspace and join the SPC 2019 channel. You can also sign up for the Slack platform community anytime over the next two days at the community activation wall that's downstairs. So there's a lot that you can do to stay connected after you leave SPC, but let's talk about how you can get the most out of the next two days. We have two great tracks for you that can help you get started with some of the new things that we've talked about today or dive into evergreen topics like testing or security that is foundational for any app. The plan track, which is going to be here in this room, is going to cover topics that help you spec out what a good app looks like. Gah, I got an ew. That's good. And in build, which is out that way and around the corner, we have workshops where you can actually crack your laptop open and get work done at a conference. We're especially thrilled to have some excellent topics from our community. Here are just a sample of them. We have deep dive on testing apps with Puppet.js. We have advice from successful app developers on how to build a business. And we also have case studies on building delightful experiences from people who have done it really well. There are also plenty of opportunities for you to talk with us directly in everyone's favorite track, the hallway track. So don't miss the chance to give us feedback on our platform roadmap, or hear what's coming next for Workflow Builder, or just take a little bit of a break between sessions and get to meet each other live. And finally, you won't want to miss this afternoon's keynote. I'll be interviewing Sarah Franklin, the founder of Salesforce's Trailhead community, about how she's grown the program from hundreds to tens of thousands of people, creating a major pillar of Salesforce's business and career growth for members of their community along the way. Communities and networks are very powerful. And so we hope we'll leave inspired. So again, thank you so much for being here. And let's have a great next two days. Thank you.

[00:52:13] Speaker 1: Thank you. You