Understanding Slack User Roles: Owners, Admins, Guests (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Have you ever wanted to know who's actually steering the ship in your workspace? Let's take a look. Hello and welcome back to Slack School. I'm your host, Mike Reynolds, and today we're going to learn about Slack user roles. User roles in Slack are the first way that access in Slack is granted. We're going to talk about what user roles are, what each user role can do, and how you can set them up. If you're new to Slack or you're studying for a Slack certification, you'll want to know everything there is to know about user roles. A user role in Slack is the first thing that defines what actions a person can take within a workspace. They determine who can manage settings, invite other members, or administer the workspace. Now, before we get too far into this, I want to be clear about what a user role is because Salesforce and Slack both use the word role, but they mean and do different things. In Salesforce, a role is a way to open up access to data using the role hierarchy. In Slack, a user role is more like a profile. Slack user roles are the tool that provide the user with the base level of permissions that they have when working in Slack. Another big difference between Slack and Salesforce is you cannot create a custom user role. Now, this content isn't the most exciting stuff, but it's really important to understand. To help make these roles more memorable, I'm going to use an analogy about a cruise ship where the top role in Slack is like the captain of the ship. After we talk about all the different roles, I'll show you how we can assign them. Let's start off with the primary workspace owner. The primary workspace owner is a single user that holds the most authority in the workspace. You can have only one primary workspace owner. In our analogy, the primary workspace owner is the captain of the ship. Fix your hat, look decent. There are a few unique abilities that the primary workspace owner has that others do not. First, they are the only user that can delete the workspace and they do billing management. If you need to change the primary workspace owner to a new user, it must be done by the current primary workspace owner. They're the only captain of the ship. And of course, you can't drive a cruise ship with just one person. It takes a team. A Slack workspace is the same. So you can have other people who are workspace owners. They just are not the primary workspace owner. They can do anything except the functions that are limited to that single primary workspace owner. But you can have as many of them as you want. You can, of course, have other people that help you drive the ship. These aren't the captain. These are workspace admins. You can have as many of these as you need. In our analogy, the workspace admin are the other sailors who also can work on the bridge of the ship. Think of workspace admins as the folks that are running around the ship doing all sorts of different jobs that need to be done to keep the ship in good working order. In Slack, they're managing channels and managing members. They're working on templates, building automations. They're a lot like Salesforce admins that you already know and love. A cruise ship wouldn't be much fun without the guests. Guest users come in two flavors, single channel and multi-channel. Single channel guests are able to join just one channel, whereas multi-channel guests can be invited to more than one. Each paid workspace member you have will allow you to have five single channel guest users. So if you have 10 paid members in your workspace, you can have a total of 50 single channel guest users. Multi-channel guests are essentially fully licensed users that are not employees. As such, they will be priced like your other workspace members. It's better to have them as guests though, because you get much better granular control over their permissions that way. You're definitely not an employee. We've talked about primary workspace owner, workspace owners, and workspace admins. So we know that they make up the group with the most access. We've also talked about the different types of guest users that we can have, but what about everybody else? What about the regular people who work here that aren't driving the boat? Well, this group of users we're going to call workspace members. This is the default role for all of your non-guests. In our analogy, workspace members are accountants, marketers, sales and service teams. They're everyone else that works here. These folks are the life force at every company, and the reason why the rest of us are here. These are our end users. I assume that they wear a hoodie like me. Let's take a look at how we would actually set a user role. When I open Slack, I've got a new admin menu on the side. I can hover over that and then choose manage members. This will open up my browser where I can then see all of the users that are in my workspace. And if I slide this menu over, I see a column called account type. We use account type and user role interchangeably. So think of those as the same thing. Here in this free instance, I've only got two users, one regular member and one primary workspace owner. Again, I can only have one primary workspace owner. The other roles, I can have as many as I like. If I wanted to change Astro's account type or Astro's user role, I would click on these three dots and then change account type. Here I can set them to workspace owner, workspace admin, or regular member. I can't change them to primary workspace owner. We wouldn't want someone to accidentally do that. So it's a slightly different process. I go to the current primary workspace owner, hover over the dots, and then follow the path behind this link of transferring ownership. Some of you may have an enterprise grid edition of Slack. If you do, you'll have some extra roles that I haven't talked about yet that I can explain without the cats. They've done enough already. Enterprise editions of Slack are instances that can hold several workspaces under one Slack umbrella. You can even have channels that span these workspaces. We've talked about the primary workspace owner, workspace owners, and workspace admins. Those roles will apply for each of your Slack workspaces inside your grid. You'll also have some roles that span your workspaces. These are the primary org owner, org owners, and org admins. These org level roles manage settings that affect the entire organization. Things like SSO configuration, domain claiming, and tools like enterprise search. The same basic rules apply to these roles. There can be only one primary org owner, but you can have more than one org owner and more than one org admin. Well, there you have it. User roles are the foundation for how we control who can do what in Slack. Tune in next week and I'll explain how permissions work with user roles. I hope you had fun learning today. Sunny and Nebula certainly did. Let me know what you thought in our Slack School channel in the Slack community workspace. You can find that at slackcommunity.com. You can even let me know what you'd like to see us do next or ask questions about any of the episodes that we've made. Don't forget to like and subscribe. Sunny and Nebula want me to say thanks for watching and good job today. Learning new stuff can be really hard, but you're crushing it. We'll see you next time. Now, of course, you can't... Are you resigning?