Slack hands more power to large company admins
Communications platform adds tools to limit announcements and automate workspace creation
Slack has revealed a set of features for admins that make it easier to manage organisations with large employee counts and busy channels.
The biggest change is that admins can now assign posting permissions more widely than a few select channels, and there is also a new set of APIs to automate the creation of workspaces with names, domains and descriptions.
"We believe this should be easier and today we're introducing a couple of new features to do just that," the company said in a blog post.
It comes a week after the company introduced more robust security measures for admins, including the ability to enforce data sharing limits and content blocks on certain devices, as well as a greater variety of two-factor authentication checks.
To start with, the announcement channels will create a single destination for the key information, so teams no longer have to decide what gets shared via email instead of what gets shared via Slack.
"We've long encouraged teams to send announcements in channels, where your employees are already working," the company said. "To broadcast those updates clearly and without distraction, admins have always been able to limit posting permissions in the default 'general' channel. Now, for teams on our Plus or Enterprise Grid plans, we're allowing users to set posting permissions for any channel."
These come in the form of 'granular' controls which limit who can post in a channel and keep chatter to a minimum, leaving the space clear for the most important updates.
As for the new admin APIs, there will be a feature to invite thousands of members at a time, without the need to join the workspace themselves. Invite guest accounts to specific channels (including private ones), set a guest expiration date and customise a welcome message, delegate admin responsibilities to a specific member and automatically trigger the events above based on information collected via web forms.
"All these APIs work towards templated workspace creation and setup," the company said. "In the future, admins can script the creation of new workspaces that will automatically be configured with their desired settings, content, apps and more."
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