Slack - Community Integration

[NoorS]

Community managers/Administrators want to remain updated with the type of content being posted on their respective communities. They also want to ensure timely response to community members/end users’ queries. 

Community managers want notifications and the ability to respond quickly because they want to create a great experience for the visitors and members in their community. Pro-active and increased engagement in a community provides a better experience that is associated with the brand and helps the community grow.

With multiple desktop/mobile applications out there, one is constantly switching between these applications to get things done. Be it setting up schedules and meetings on calendars, reading emails, communicating with colleagues via messaging tools like slack/teams etc, there is always a constant move from one application to another. And for community managers, community itself is one additional application that also requires attention.

Slack and Community integration brings your community to your Slack workspace. 

With Community and Slack integration, community managers/administrators/staff can be notified of community discussions on Slack instantly. And people can then reply, kudo, or discuss the post with others directly in Slack.  

How does this work?

Khoros has developed a Slack application “Community by Khoros”. This App will be a bridge between your slack workspace and your community platform. It is a one stop solution that enables you to interact with your community without you actually visiting the community. 

With the “Community by Khoros” App for Slack you can:

• Receive notifications of all the message post subscriptions. If you have subscribed to a board/post/thread, you will receive instant notifications on your Slack workspace. This includes replies to comments or new posts.
• If you have been mentioned in any of the community posts, that demand your immediate attention, you will be instantly notified on your Slack Workspace
  

• You can reply immediately once you receive the notifications from Slack workspace itself. You need not login to the community
• You want to search something in the community? No need to login to the community. You can use slash command from your workspace to search within your community

In addition, you can also leverage existing features of Slack. If you want to be reminded later on a notification, set up a reminder. You can even copy the link and share the notifications across different Slack channels.

How do you enable Slack - Community Integration?

Slack Integration is available as an Early Access. Please file a support ticket to enable it.

Community by Khoros application can only be installed by a community manager/administrator of a Khoros community. 

You can install the “Community by Khoros” app directly from the Admin Portal of your community. 

Step 1: Visit Slack Integration under Admin Portal:

Admin

Step 2: Once you click on “Add to Slack” button”, you will be routed to a Slack permission page:

For more details about Slack Integration, please check out Slack Integration Details.

[StanGromer]

Is this EA available now, or not until 20.10?  I would love to be using it right now if someone wants to enable it for us 😄  (CSM has been aware for months, support ticket is also open, so if I am just stuck waiting until then, no worries, excited for this!)

edit - Well, I randomly decided to check my stage instance, and see it is live in there actually, so ignore me 🙂

[NoorS]

Hi @StanGromer, this is available as EA in 20.10. However, I will get it enabled immediately on your staging site. 😊 You can enable it in prod as soon as your community is upgraded to 20.10.

[NoorS]

Hi @StanGromer , I had enabled Slack on your staging site last week itself. I had updated the same to Eva Van Voorhis. Please let me know.

[Claudius]

When setting up the Slack app I run into this error:

Unapproved permissions requested
channels:history, channels:read, channels:manage

Here's a screenshot:

We also had our Slack admin try to perform the installation with the same result.

Any suggestions on what we can try here?

[NoorS]

Hi @Claudius - The Slack feature has been incorrectly enabled. We will be re-enabling it for you. For, 20.8, we request customers to test the feature on stage only. Slack Integration feature is available in 20.10 as EA, where we recommend to enable on prod.

[NoorS]

Hi @Claudius , we have re-enabled it. Please let us know if its working now.

Thanks

[TeroRe]

If we want to discuss internally around the certain topic, I mean in the Slack, is it possible some how? Because if you read the community thread in the Slack and if you type comment it will goes to the community as well. Sometimes we want to discuss internally before we reply to the customers. Is there easy way for this?

[NoorS]

Hi @TeroRe - Presently, there is no specific way to discuss this in a group. Its a one on one Bot. 

Thanks

[TeroRe]

@NoorS  Slack has Reply in thread -feature itself, does it work with this? I mean that from the community comes the topic to read in the Slack and we start internal discussion using Slack´s Reply in thread -feature?

[NoorS]

Hi @TeroRe , Slack's "reply in thread" cannot used here. If you reply via this, the reply will remain only in the "Community by Khoros" app. However, you can leverage Slack's other existing features like "reminder" and "pinning". 

[TeroRe]

Okay, thanks @NoorS 

[AriWeissman]

@NoorS 

To confirm, when you say the integration is "a one on one Bot" that means I am not able to have the bot post in a public Slack channel. It will only message me directly. Is that right?

[NoorS]

Hi @AriWeissman , Yes, it would message you directly via the "Community by Khoros" app. It will not push messages to a any channel.

Thanks

[aryaankhan]

yes  It will not push messages to a any channel.

[aryaankhan]

 Slack Integration feature is available in 20.10 as EA, where we recommend to enable on prod.

[Finney0225]

Are you able to integrate slack <> khoros in a stage environment or only in prod?

[NoorS]

Hi @Finney0225 - You can integrate Slack integration on both stage and prod environments. The potential problem that you can encounter with stage environment is that it is usually behind an HTaccess. Since this is a third party integration, it is important that site should be publicly accessible. 

CC: @AshishKe 

[rahulp411]

Hello Thanks for sharing such an Important information with us. Thank You so much it will help me alot 

[TeroRe]

"Its a one on one Bot"

If I want to give easy way to our stakeholders (etc) to follow what´s happening in the community is it possible to do with the Slack integration?

I mean that every discussion from the certain board can be found from the certain Slack channel and people without community account can follow them there?

[TedV]

Hi @NoorS , could you perhaps provide some insight into this?

Thanks!

[RahulHa]

@TeroRe Scope of the current support on Community-Slack integration is primarily to deliver a community member's notifications on the brand's Slack workspace.  As an additional channel in addition to the pre-existing modes such as email notifications. In that sense, yes, this is a good way for the stakeholders to stay on top of community conversations while remaining on Slack. In addition to receiving these notifications, they can also undertake simple actions such as Kudo and Reply right from within Slack.

Support for additional channels on Slack each corresponding to different nodes in the community is not something that is available today. For example, if certain stakeholders in your company want to be notified on new ideas being submitted. It is an enhancement idea that we have in our backlog. Will plan as a future enhancement.

[TeroRe]

Thanks @RahulHa for the update.

[irach15]

@RahulHa 

hey, we are getting complains that the search functionality is not working in Slack integration.

something got broken

can you pz check?

any additional settings?

Also, clicking on "Configuration" or "App Homepage" never navigates to the App, just to Slack generic homepage

[RahulHa]

@irach15 On a quick check, this did work for us. We can investigate further, meanwhile do you have details or confirmation on what is the issue while trying to search?

Here's a link to the documentation: https://community.khoros.com/t5/Integrating-with-Slack/Participating-on-the-community-via-Slack/ta-p...

cc: @AshishKe 

[sparkygirl]

I may have misunderstood this. Can our community members access the slack channel if we make an open slack workspace? Or this app is only for internal people to be alerted/shown new comments in the community.

Also when you say that comments from slack are written back to Khoros, do subsequent comments also get posted?

Thanks! 

[Miran]

Hey @RahulHa  , thanks for the regular updates. You mentioned last August that, "Support for additional channels on Slack each corresponding to different nodes in the community is not something that is available today." Do you happen to have any updates on this enhancement? Thanks!

[RahulHa]

Hi @Miran Enhancements to Slack integration as well as additional integrations such as MS Teams are in our backlog. However, we have not firmed up a timeline for those yet.

These are priority items and we plan to pick these up as soon as some of the currently active projects such as Aurora (the new community experience) and the new Analytics solution are in more advanced stages.

[sparkygirl]

@RahulHa Would you be able to answer my question as well (two posts up)?

[AshishKe]

@sparkygirl  If the community members have access to the Slack workspace and they are using the same email id for both , members should be able to get notifications via Slack. 
Yes, all comments on the thread will be notified via Slack, similar to how it works for email notifications. From Slack you can reply to each comment. 

[sparkygirl]

Thanks @AshishKe ... you say all comments will be notified via slack but will they be written back to the Khoros community pages? The functionality described above seems to be all about the Slack side...I am trying to understand how the content of threads might get over to Khoros. Thanks again for the info!

[AshishKe]

@sparkygirl When you reply to a community post via Slack, your reply gets reflected in the community and is posted on the corresponding community thread.

[sparkygirl]

@AshishKe If a thread is going in slack and that message is then posted to the community, if someone replies in the community, does that response also go to the slack thread?

In other words, are the threads mirrored?

Thanks so much!

[StanGromer]

@sparkygirl This isn’t actually creating slack conversations between the users. It’s just sending you, an individual, the notification. Said different, it’s the same as receiving an email notification saying you got a response to this post. That just happens in slack as well. 

[sparkygirl]

Oh crud. This is just about notifications? When @ashisheKe said "When you reply to a community post via Slack, your reply gets reflected in the community and is posted on the corresponding community thread."--what does that mean?

Here is what we are trying to do: We have a khoros community and we want to add a slack workspace that is available externally. Is there a way to keep the posts in sync or are you saying our internal slack people will just get notifications that there are posts? In other words, is there no external component other than external users can also get a notification that there is a reply in Khoros?

[RahulHa]

As @StanGromer mentions, this is primarily a new notification channel.  However it comes with quick support for actions such as Kudo and Reply right from within Slack.

For example, please see below how this message from @sparkygirl got delivered on my Slack instance with the options to kudo and/or reply. 

Any action taken such as a kudo or reply is mirrored on the Community. Hope this clarifies.

[PatrickEmin]

Hi, apparently PM (forums Personal messages) are not notified via this integration.
Can you confirm?
Because I was thinking of turning OFF my mails notifications alltogether but I would miss the PM notifications, so that doesn't seem possible.

Thanks

[AshishKe]

Hi @PatrickEmin , that is correct. Notifications for private messages are not sent via slack integration. 

[diptikaushikkar]

Is it on the roadmap to enable slack notifications for slack channels?

Sending the notifications to my individual "slack inbox" isn't helpful when we have a team of community staff monitoring the community. It'd be more helpful for the notifications to be sent to a channel where we can coordinate replies/ engagement.

[AshishKe]

@diptikaushikkar  It is a priority item in our backlog. We plan to pick it up once some of the current priority projects such as Aurora (the new community experience) and the new Analytics solution are completed.