Documentation to understand Slack and how it functions

What is Slack?

Slack is a collaboration hub that can replace email to help you and your team work together seamlessly. It’s designed to support the way people naturally work together, so you can collaborate with people online as efficiently as you do face-to-face.

What is Slack Workspace?

A Slack workspace is made up of channels (groups), where team members can communicate and work together.

Features of Slack Channels:

• Organized Conversations: In Slack, team members send messages and share files in channels. You can make channels private for conversations that shouldn’t be open to all members, or you can use shared channels to collaborate with an organization outside your own

• Searchable History: When messages and files are shared in public channels, information flows transparently throughout Slack. You can search your team's conversation history in Slack to find relevant messages, files, channels, and people

• Connected Apps: Add apps to your workspace to connect services or tools you're already using to Slack. With the right apps installed, you can do your work without ever leaving your Slack workspace. Find thousands of apps to help you stay productive, organized and efficient in the Slack App Directory.

• Slack Calls: You can start a voice or video call with any other members of your workspace right from Slack. Share your screen to show your teammates exactly what you see on your computer — you can even draw on your screen while you’re screen sharing

Every Slack workspace has a team of members with varying administrative permissions. As a whole, a workspace is typically comprised of the following people:

• Workspace Owners: Creates workspace and set permissions

• Workspace Admins: Assigned my Owners to help manage the team

• Members: Can send messages and files to any team members in the workspace they belong to

• Guests: Can send messages and files in specific channels

What are Channels?

In Slack, teamwork and communication happen in channels. A channel is a single place for a team to share messages, tools and files.

Types of Channels:

• Public Channels: They’re open to all members to join and anything posted is searchable by others

• Private Channels: They’re for discussions that shouldn’t be open to all members, so you must be invited to join one to view it in Slack

• Shared Channels: Shared channels let two separate organizations work together in a single channel, each from their own Slack workspace. They can be public or private, but they're only available for paid subscriptions.

• Multi-Workspace Channels: Multi-workspace channels connect separate workspaces within an Enterprise Grid organization — they can be public or private, but they're only available for the Enterprise Grid subscription.

Apps Integrations with Slack:

• Apps connect your Slack workspace with the tools and services that you use at work every day

• Add apps to Slack to centralize and streamline your work

• With all of your tools in one place, you can easily send a relevant message in Slack to another service or create tasks in your project management software directly from your workspace

Slack integration with JIRA:

Slack can be integrated with Jira and can be used to create tasks, transition, comment, re-assign etc., along with the following features:

• Prompt Jira bot to send customizable notifications to you and your channels

• Once you’ve connected a project to a Slack channel, Jira bot will automatically preview Jira issues in Slack when they’re mentioned

• Use message actions to create new issues or add to existing issues in Slack

• Use slash commands to manage and look up issues in Slack

Commands to interact with JIRA:

/jira connect: Connect and subscribe to Jira events
/jira manage: Manage your Jira connections and subscriptions
/jira create Summary: Create issue
/jira DEMO-1: Get information about a specific issue
/jira unfurl: Toggle issue previews on or off
/jira feedback: Tell us what you think about the app
/jira help: Show this help information
/jira logout: Log out of the Jira Slack app

Slack Calls:

With Slack Calls, you can make a voice or video call and connect with any member of your workspace.

Features of Slack Calls:

• Voice Calls

• Video Calls

• Screen Share

Note: These features are available only on paid subscription and doesn’t support any browsers except Google Chrome

File Sharing in Slack

• You can share a file that you’ve already added to Slack to a channel or direct message, or by sharing a link

• Any member with access to a file that you’ve uploaded to Slack can also share it with others

• Sharing a file with its original message can provide additional context or keep a discussion going

• Sharing a stand-alone file is particularly helpful when sending a file in a shared channel or to a guest

Slack shortcuts and commands

• Slash commands act as shortcuts for specific actions in Slack

• Type a slash command in the message field, select enter to send, and that's it

• To see a full list of available slash commands for your workspace, even custom ones, type a / forward slash in any channel or direct message

Import / Export Data

• You can import data from external sources such as CSV, Hipchat, Campfire, Text file etc into Slack

• You can export data from Slack as JSON

Note: When we export only the public channels data will be exported