New in Missions — a messaging based workflow system for Slack

Logic, Reactions, Zapier, Enterprise Grid, more Emoji 🤠

Happy New Year! The Missions team is off to a great start this year and couldn’t be more excited for the year to come (big plans! 🐼). We’ve been so busy speaking with users and getting improvements out the door that we nearly forgot to announce them! 😅

Here’s a round-up 🏇 of the latest improvements to Missions to start 2018.

Logic steps

We have a new branching step that lets you split off down different paths when certain conditions are met. Logic steps may include up to five branching conditions; for example, traverse the “High Priority” path when the “Priority” from Step 1 is “High”, otherwise take the “Normal” path.

Head down different paths when certain conditions are met.

Logic steps support up to five paths

Logic steps also introduce a way to filter Missions workflows; for example, if a Mission is triggered from a Github webhook but should only continue if the title of an issue contains the phrase “Important”.

Learn more about Logic steps

Update Message step

The new Update Message step lets you update a message previously send in a Mission. With this you can communicate updates to workflow status in realtime while minimizing “noise”.

Messages from the same instance sent to same channel are automatically threaded. When a Notification message is the first message in a channel, we call it the “anchor message”. As the Mission progresses and new updates are sent to the thread, you can update the “anchor message” with progress and status. This way the channel acts as a queue of workflows that one can quickly scan and understand the status of each outstanding Mission.

Here’s this pattern in action in a Legal Document Review Mission:

Update the “anchor message” in a channel to convey status of a workflow

Learn more about Update Message steps

New Emoji Picker

Slack workflows are better with Emoji. It’s verifiable, quantifiable and a proven fact ⚖. The new Emoji Picker lets you easily add emoji to your messages, including all of your teams custom emoji 💥, because emoji is the new lingua franca. Brad Harris did a lot of sleuthing on this one!

New Missions Emoji Picker

Reaction steps

We’ve added two new steps that let you add or remove emoji reactions on a Slack message in a Mission workflow. The new steps us the shiny new Emoji Picker discussed above 👆.

Emoji reaction is another great way to communicate status

Learn more about Add and Remove Reaction steps

Webhook improvements and Zapier integration

We’ve simplified how Missions handles webhooks to make it easy to work with Zapier. With Zapier you can integrate with over 1000 different services and make your Missions reach further:

1. Launch a Mission with a Webhook Trigger from Zapier
2. Call a “Zap” within a Mission via a Webhook Step.

Learn more about using Zapier with Mission in this tutorial

Improved Enterprise Grid support

We have a growing number of customers using Missions with Enterprise Grid. To speak frankly, we had a number of “opportunities” to improve the experience of Missions with Grid. Today I’m happy to announce that Missions works great with Grid shared channels, even in situations where Missions is installed in one team but not others.

Execute workflows across Grid teams with shared channels and direct messages

Performance for large teams

Lastly we’ve made considerable improvements to Missions page load times for teams with many users and many channels. 🏃

Missions is a new messaging based workflow system for Slack that makes teams more productive by helping to coordinate activities between people to move work forward. Our visual editor enables anyone to create custom workflows for their team. Turbocharge your team today with Missions!