Building apps for shared channels

Simplify coordination and unlock adoption with apps in shared channels

Shared channels, now available for all Slack customers, is a new feature that enables teams from different organizations to work together in Slack as productively as they work with their own companies. Shared channels work just like regular channels, only now they connect two organizations: Company A can communicate in the same Slack channel as its partners at Company B. New people coming into a project can readily access a project’s archive, share updates and files, loop in the right people and quickly make decisions — all from a single place in Slack.

Just as in regular channels, Slack apps can help enable this work. Besides opening up new use cases, shared channels can also unlock organic discovery of your app: When someone uses an app in a shared channel, others in the channel can see how it helps people work — regardless of whether both workspaces have installed it.

Read on to learn how to get ready for shared channels.

How apps help move work forward in shared channels

People in shared channels connect to the organizations they work with, like agencies, contractors, partners, vendors or customers. You can build an app specific to these use cases, helping teams to:

Handle contracts or payments: Teams in shared channels often work with external agencies and contractors. Keep things humming along with apps for negotiating, signing and finalizing contracts or POs.

Get notified on key updates, like incidents, company metrics or upcoming deadlines. Notification-based apps can make sure everyone has the information they need, when they need it.

With Zoom, for instance, someone can quickly spin up a call and post the recording back into the channel for others to digest later.

Or, with Google Calendar for Teams, people in a shared channel can receive helpful summaries of the week’s upcoming Google Calendar events.

Manage and approve projects: Project management apps can help two teams add tasks, assign owners or mark to-do’s as complete — so nothing falls through the cracks.

For instance, let’s say you built an app to help execute a brand campaign with your creative agency. When your agency’s external designers complete a task, the app could automatically post the designer’s comments inside Slack for your team to review.

In this way, your team can collaborate in real time with people outside the shared channel, too — so you can communicate with your external agency’s designers as naturally as you do with your own colleagues.

Adapting to a shared channels world

Shared channels can introduce your app to new faces and related edge cases. To get ready, you’ll first want to adopt the Conversations API. Aside from helping your app perform well in shared channels, these Web API methods include performance improvements to help your app scale in any channel.

Second, subscribe to new channel_shared and channel_unshared events to be notified when someone shares or unshares a channel. And if you’re starting fresh, know that our Node and Python SDKs, as well as Bolt — the official Slack app development framework — have been updated to play nicely with shared channels.

Finally, you can test your app in a shared channel by requesting sandboxes for Slack Enterprise Grid. Visit the shared channels Slack API documentation to get started. We can’t wait to see what you build!

See what else was announced this year at Spec, the Slack developer conference.

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