Connecting Other Services to Slack

Quick reference

• 00:04 Hello everyone and welcome back to this GoSkills.com course.
• 00:08 I'm your host Francesco D'Alessio and
• 00:10 you are on essential productivity which we'll be covering resources and
• 00:15 all types of productivity to help boost your daily routine.
• 00:19 This is Slack, so we talked about Slack in the previous episode which covered more
• 00:24 about the channel's direct messages, how you can share regular messages and files
• 00:29 with your team, and also find your team and communicate with them using Slack.
• 00:33 This is really important because Slack is really taking a lot of things by storm.
• 00:38 This concept of direct messages is something that a lot of people
• 00:42 are leaning towards out of email because it's more effective and more productive.
• 00:47 Of course,
• 00:48 I'm gonna show you how to do some smaller things that will help your productivity.
• 00:52 Inside of Slack, you can set messages for other people.
• 00:56 However, there's this thing called Slackbot.
• 00:58 It's like a bot, it's a chat bot, it's a way to communicate and ask for help.
• 01:02 For example, if I just typed in help, I could put in a slash and
• 01:07 all of these will appear.
• 01:08 For example, all of these things are shortcuts.
• 01:11 For example, if I wanna learn all the shortcuts,
• 01:13 then all the shortcuts would appear.
• 01:15 You can also do this with inviting people to channels, sending feedback to Slack,
• 01:21 feeding on the RSS feeds, expanding, collapsing, and
• 01:25 also apps and directory, which I'll show you in a minute.
• 01:29 You can also search, which is pretty handy.
• 01:31 So if you wanted to search, it would bring up search here.
• 01:34 So these are all very handy.
• 01:36 So there is this reminder function where you can just type in /remind,
• 01:40 put in the person's name and then what he'd like to remind you of,
• 01:44 pick up the shopping at 4PM today.
• 01:48 I could type that in and as you can see, it's added it as a reminder.
• 01:52 So if I click View Reminders, what will happen is you see the upcoming reminders,
• 01:57 and it will give you the option to complete or delete it.
• 02:00 This will appear in your Slackbot and will be a slight little reminder for
• 02:03 you to pick up the shopping today.
• 02:05 Now that's one of my favorite little Slackbot functions and
• 02:08 also ways that you can assign tasks to other people.
• 02:12 So if you wanted to,
• 02:13 you could type in remind and highlight a person in your team.
• 02:19 For example, Kieran, and you can type in what you want him to do, and
• 02:23 it will appear in his Slackbot,
• 02:25 which is a very neat way to keep other team members organized.
• 02:29 Now, of course, you can use apps inside of Slack, so
• 02:31 if you press Enter, and go into the App Directory.
• 02:35 The App Directory is a place where you can connect apps to Slack.
• 02:38 There are tons of abilities.
• 02:40 You can use Zapier.
• 02:42 And there are, categories-wise, you could have Bots, Analytics, Communication,
• 02:46 Customer Support, Design, Developers, File Management, Health & Medical, HR,
• 02:51 Marketing.
• 02:52 Office Management, Travel, Social, Security, Sales, Project Management,
• 02:56 Productivity.
• 02:57 We're gonna click on Productivity for this example.
• 03:00 One of the biggest resources that you can connect with is Trello.
• 03:03 Trello works really well with Slack and gives you a way to invite other people to
• 03:07 Trello channels and also join cards, Trello cards and Trello boards.
• 03:12 You can actually assign other people to Trello, all you have to do is install it.
• 03:16 Of course, you have to be the admin of this, but it's very easy to do.
• 03:20 And of course, you can connect things like Todoist to it as well, so
• 03:24 that whenever you type in /Todoist and assign something.
• 03:28 For example, meet John today, it will add it straight to your to-do list.
• 03:32 So all of this is very handy.
• 03:33 You can also add memos, use MeisterTask, Lucidchart, and a couple of
• 03:38 other micro and to-do list applications and project management resources.
• 03:43 You can also connect to the likes of Google Hangout, Zoom, MailChimp,
• 03:47 Skype, Intercom.
• 03:48 There are so many different communication ways that you can keep inside of Slack and
• 03:52 do everything you want to do.
• 03:54 The popular ones are Zapier and
• 03:55 then people like to connect Slack to other resources so it's very beneficial.
• 04:00 Once you get one or two resources set up,
• 04:02 that's something you might want to get started with.
• 04:05 But naturally, if you want some basic customization,
• 04:09 go to Preferences at the top and you can also Highlight keywords, Do not disturb,
• 04:14 Sound and appearance, and you can also have it your inactive functions as well.
• 04:19 You can also change the message design, the emoji design and
• 04:22 display options as well as sidebar themes.
• 04:26 For example, if I wanted to change this to another one, you can change it,
• 04:30 which is quite nice.
• 04:30 So if I wanted Hoth, it's quite a nice theme.
• 04:33 And also Search, Mark as Read, Accessibility and Advanced.
• 04:36 So you can actually go into detail on the customization side of things and
• 04:40 actually get a better experience from that.
• 04:43 So I hope you enjoyed this feature app.
• 04:45 We'll be rounding that up in an exercise that you can go away and
• 04:48 check out, so don't be afraid to go and explore that one.
• 04:52 Thanks very much.

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