Autobots Assemble!
Do you find it tedious to perform more than one task for a single action? Time consuming and frustrating, isn’t it? Are you repeating the same set of tasks over and over again?
Flock is the solution for you. You may possess a set of tools that you use often. With Webhooks, you can integrate these tools within Flock itself. Flock allows you to:
- Receive notifications into your Flock conversation: Make sure that you have all your most important information in one place only. This is an easy option for do-it-yourself integrations if you’d like to get all your notifications within Flock from other applications or systems.
- Send data from Flock to other applications to get work done faster: Make bots and get work done by integrating applications with the Flock client. This allows you to do everything from interacting with CRM’s to pushing status messages to social platforms from Flock itself.
Say Hello to the Trello BOT
Our Product team just can’t stay away from the Trello App. In the words of our Product & Design Director, Ninad Raval “Trello is an intelligent project management tool and is highly recommended in the professional space. Trello helps our employees plan and organize projects efficiently, assign tasks to relevant members and keep track of related activities.”
Our weekly planning discussions on Flock generally generate a long list of tasks that are meant to be added to Trello boards. It’s really cumbersome for the team to find and open the Trello app and add each task manually. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if a message that is typed into a group on Flock can directly be added to a Trello Board?
Autobots Assemble. This is your calling! And this is how the Trello Bot was born. The Trello Bot is invoked through messages in Flock groups. The Bot then adds those messages as tasks on Trello boards automatically on your behalf. Flock in conjunction with Zapier allows you to do multiple tasks for a single action triggered via the Flock App.
Why should I integrate Apps in Flock using Zapier?
Applications are the tools that one uses for project management, customer relations, project management, marketing or social networking. They make it easier to get essential tasks done and contribute largely to the success of a company as a whole. They allow users to collaborate, manage, market and communicate. They do many things, but fall short when it comes to interacting and working with each other.
Zapier lets your apps work together. Zapier is an automation software that allows one business app to speak to another. With Zapier you can create unique one to one communication channels (called zaps) between apps. Using these zaps you can create your own recipe that will pass data from an application to Flock and vice-versa.
Let’s go through the steps to make a Trello Bot in Flock:
1. Go to the Zapier Dashboard. Click on ‘Make a New Zap’. Now let’s start the configuring our outgoing webhook from Flock to Zapier. In the Search Bar, search and select ‘Webhooks by Zapier’.
2. When any event is generated within a group, the attached hook is invoked by the Flock application through an HTTP POST request. So select ‘Catch Hook’ as your option; this will wait for a new POST, PUT or GET to a Zapier URL. Click on the ‘Save+Continue’ button.
3. On the next screen Zapier will give you a HTTPS call back URL for Flock to send a request to Zapier. Copy this URL and login to the Flock Admin Panel.
4. Configure an outgoing webhook.
Additional Reference Material on configuring a Webhook: https://flockapi.atlassian.net/wiki/display/FlockAPI/Outgoing+Webhooks
- Choose a group -> Select the group from which you want to trigger the action.
- Name that the Webhook will post as -> Select the name for your Webhook.
- Callback URL -> Add the URL from Zapier.
- Icon (optional) ->Browse and select the icon you’d like the Webhook to use.
- Once you have filled in all the fields, click on the ‘Save’ button.
5. On the next screen it will reconfirm if you have added the Callback URL to your Outgoing Webhook on the Flock Admin Panel. Once you have confirmed the same, Zapier will run a test to authenticate the Outgoing Webhook that you are trying to configure.
For the authentication to complete it is very important that you trigger a test action from Flock. When the test is in progress, send a test message from the group that you have enlisted while configuring your Outgoing Webhook.
Upon return to the Zapier dashboard, you will find that the authentication and the test run has been successful.
Our next step will be to configure the app that will perform a task when an event is triggered within the Flock Group. In this case, we will be adding a new card to a list on the Trello board for each new message in the triggering group.
- So under the Action section of our Zap recipe, search and select ‘Trello’.
2. Select the ‘Trello’ action to be performed when the event is triggered within the Flock Group. In this case, we want to add cards to an already existing list on the Trello board.
3. Add your Trello account and authenticate it.
4. Once you have authenticated your Trello account, on the next screen it will ask you which Board, List and what content from the event trigger you want to added to the Trello card.
5. One of the features that Zapier allowsvis to test your zaps before one completes your configuration. Run the test, and once you receive a success message, check if a card is being added to the list on the Trello board.
Once the above steps are done, turn on your recipe and your integration is good to go. As soon as any message is sent in the group, it will trigger the event which will add a card corresponding to that message on the Trello Board.
Similarly if there is any other action that you want to add to your recipe, simple click on the + button at the bottom of the work flow and customize your recipe to suit your work. Here, we have created a Checkvist integration with the existing workflow; a task will be created under the ‘To be Done Today’s’ list. Similarly to get your work done faster with Flock, you can tweak the integration accordingly.
So why waste time doing the same task over and over again? Simply download Flock and get your work done on the double!
-Authored by Farzan Shaikh
