fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
June update
By: Maxim Leonovich
Tags: Slack, Knowledge Management, Collaboration, Updates, Startup Life

June was an interesting month for OneBar. Not much has changed in the product, but a lot of time went into planing and brainstorming. Anyway, let’s quickly go over all the things that changed.

Merged Title and Description

Problem Title and Problem Description are now visually part of the same text area. It turned out to be quite challenging to implement, but we hope that this little change will help to reduce confusion caused by too many inputs in OneBar forms.

New NN

We’ve trained a new Neural Network that helps us detect information worth saving to or searching in OneBar. Currently you can only see in action at the Slack Import page (it helps us draw those blue dots), but we are going to use it to improve search intelligence and power up a cool new feature which, hopefully, will be included in the next update.

Small tweaks to the Slack Bot

We have made a few changes to the OneBar UI in Slack. For example, unresolved Problems are now marked as (unresolved) in search results…

… or you can mark a Solution as Invalid right from Slack

and a few more.

Welcome, Svetlana!

Svetlana Novikova is an experienced Tech Writer and Knowledge Manager. She runs a Russian-speaking community for Knowledge Managers (https://t.me/the_know_all) and she will be helping OneBar team to better shape the product and produce high quality content for our users.
GreetBot Gets a New Account Dashboard
By: Piotr Bakker
Tags: Slack, Productivity, Human Resources, Teamwork, Onboarding

GreetBot Gets a New Account Dashboard

GreetBot has passed a number of milestones recently. We are now serving more than 10,000 workspaces worldwide, delivering an average of 50,000 greetings per week. Somehow, in the course of the last four years GreetBot has delivered over 2.5 million welcome messages to more than 2 million individual Slack users. Wow!

As GreetBot continues to reach more people we wanted to make it easier for Slack admins to keep an eye on the onboarding activity within their own workspaces. This can be tricky. A large proportion of GreetBot’s messages is delivered privately, making it difficult for admins to see whether anything is happening at all. And the more people join a workspace, the harder it gets to keep track of the big picture.

Thus far, our go-to solution has been GreetBot’s log command. It’s a simple utility that lists the latest messages that have been delivered along with the total number of messages GreetBot has sent to date. But the log is best suited to providing granular information related to the activity of individual members, such as read receipts and delivery dates for their welcome messages. Not a bird’s eye view of the onboarding activity as a whole.

Over the last few months we’ve been working towards filling this gap and making activity data more accessible. And there’s hardly a better way to do it than with a big, bold account dashboard. So that is also what we’ve built. As of last week, when you sign into your account you’ll be greeted by your key onboarding metrics, like the number of new joiners welcomed to date or the number of channel messages posted in total. You can’t miss it.

Here’s how it looks:
What is Slogging?
By: Limarc Ambalina
Tags: Blogging, Slack, Slogging, Technology, Software

What is Slogging?

Your Slack? Insightful Words every day by your highly intelligent people.

Your Company’s Blog? Not so much.

​Every day, amazing tech companies have tons of high-quality conversations. Conversations that could shape the future of the Internet. Conversations that prove the intelligence of your people and the values of your company. And yet, most tech companies are only publishing a blog post a week or less. Lots of remarkable content is lost to the ether forever, never marketing what you’re about. Slogging is about elevating the best conversations you’re already having.

Big Data Jobs

The future of tech publishing revolves around transparency and distribution. To up your rate of quality publishing, Slogging will empower you to curate and distribute your best organic internal discussions via Hacker Noon.

How Slogging works:

One command to curate your most marketable Slack discussions into Hacker Noon stories.

Step1: Have a Great Slack Conversation. If you’re a tech startup this is constantly already happening.

Step 2: On the Slack Thread, Admin commands “…” -> Slogging. You can also add a suggested headline after the command.

Trending AI Articles:

Step 3: The Thread Becomes a Beautifully Formatted Hacker Noon Draft. Via Hacker Noon, you can review/edit the story as much as you want before submitting, or automatically submit from Slack.

Step 4: Editors Review Your Tech Conversation for Publication in Hacker Noon. Your tech conversation has the opportunity to reach our 3,000,000 monthly readers. You own the content and can publish it anywhere else too

How to Start Slogging

Slogging is currently in beta and you can sign up via the waitlist here.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !
Communication Working Remote
By: Catherine Argue
Tags: Slack, Messaging, User Experience, UX Design

Communicating from Home

During the COVID-19 pandemic, which began in early spring of 2020, workers globally have had to switch gears and learn to work remotely. After over a year of remote working, it has become obvious that remote workers are emotionally and physically unable to perform the same as they did in person — because of the disconnection and dissociation from their place of work. Let’s ask ourselves, “How might we preserve a strong sense of unity and community for remote workers within their company?”

This very prompt was used to generate interview questions for a variety of remote workers, outlining some major questions about their experiences working remotely — while validating our assumptions. A primary persona was created to describe the major wants, needs, frustrations, and attributes of a particular user base undergoing remote communication.

A proposed Slack mobile feature was created through the ideation and design iteration process, after analyzing and synthesizing user interviews and later two rounds of Figma prototype usability tests. The feature allows users to send conversation starters by suggested or searched category, randomized subject, or customized subject. Various users tested both the Lo-FI and Hi-Fi versions of this feature — as key feature insights and future recommendations were recorded.

Through user feedback, we were able to pinpoint the exact needs of our users to focus on creating solutions that solve our main focus — how we can bring users together socially to start new conversations, celebrate each other, and motivate each other during these isolated times.

Problem Space

To fully understand our users, we need to first understand their behaviors, challenges, and any changes that they have faced since becoming remote. We are in search of the recent major impacts that remote working has had on the communication, community, and productivity within companies.

Hypothesis + Assumptions

We first start the research process by reaching a hypothesis based on assumptions in the described problem space.

Discover + Define

To understand if our hypothesis and assumptions are true— we look to interviewees to answer a series of questions about their experiences working from home.
SkillFlow — Designing a Slackbot. Personal Project, 2015
By: Hunter Rice
Tags: Slack, Hackathons, Stackoverflow, Conversational UI, Bots

Personal Project, 2015 | User Experience | Duration: 3 months

🐦 @hunterrice20

Problem

I was seeking to build a deeper foundation for my web development capabilities, and like any fledgling developer, I turned to Stack Overflow for programming help. For the most part, it served its purpose, but when it came to broader concepts, the deferred Q&A format became limiting.

I approached the best web developer I knew and sought to build a more interactive, real-time solution.

Ideation Process

Exploration

I liked the idea of utilizing the tight knit programming community and hackathon space to build the platform on.

Building on Slack was a natural decision, as it would facilitate integration into these existing communities.

User Persona

Starting in the hackathon universe, we would need to populate the platform with both students & mentors in order for the product to be useful and effective. I developed a basic user persona for each of our target demographics, and kept them close by for reference throughout the UX design process.
Google Cloud Build 教學(三) — 透過 Slack 發送 CI 結果
Tags: Gcp, Slack, Ci, Cloud Build

正確啟動後，結果如下，並點選 Add New Webhooks to Workspace ，開始設定

在這邊選擇你現有 Slack 團隊的 Channel 或是個人頻道，看需求要怎麼發，最後點選 Authorize ，就設定完成囉～！

最後結果，可以產生一個 Webhooks ，之後要給 GCB 呼叫並根據結果，傳送通知到 Slack。

創建 Cloud Build Storage

根據上一篇教學 Google Cloud Build 教學(二 )，以經有創建好的專案了，所以這邊我們就在這個專案裡面，新創建一個 Storage，來存放並部署之後要用來呼叫 Slack API 的服務。

名稱可以用專案 ID_cloudbuilds ，其他就好，最後點選建立就好囉！

本地端設置

我們可以從本地端寫好呼叫 Slack API 的程式後，在部署上去 GCP Storage，詳細說明可以參考官網說明 → 點我

創建一個資料夾 gcb_slack，並進入資料夾

mkdir ~/gcb_slack

cd ~/gcb_slack

2. 創建一個新檔案 index.js ，這邊參考官網的 code 即可，如需要顯示更多資訊或回傳內容，請再依需求自己修改內容。

SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL : 這邊請貼上在 Slack 創建好的 Webhooks url

const IncomingWebhook = require('@slack/client').IncomingWebhook;

const SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL = "[SLACK_WEBHOOK]"

const webhook = new IncomingWebhook(SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL);



module.exports.subscribe = (event, callback) => {

const build = eventToBuild(event.data.data);



const status = ['SUCCESS', 'FAILURE', 'INTERNAL_ERROR', 'TIMEOUT'];

if (status.indexOf(build.status) === -1) {

return callback();

}



const message = createSlackMessage(build);

webhook.send(message, callback);

};



const eventToBuild = (data) => {

return JSON.parse(new Buffer(data, 'base64').toString());

}



const createSlackMessage = (build) => {

let message = {

text: `Build \`${build.id}\``,

mrkdwn: true,

attachments: [

{

title: 'Build logs',

title_link: build.logUrl,

fields: [{

title: 'Status',

value: build.status

}]

}

]

};

return message

}

3. 創建 package.json

{

"name": "google-container-slack",

"version": "0.0.1",

"description": "Slack integration for Google Cloud Build, using Google Cloud Functions",

"main": "index.js",

"dependencies": {

"@slack/client": "3.9.0"

}

}

部署

將前面所創建好的 index.js 和 package.json 部署上去 GCP Storage，進入gcb_slack 資料夾，並下指令，其中 [STAGING_BUCKET_NAME]，就是前面所建立的專案 ID_cloudbuilds。

gcloud functions deploy subscribe --stage-bucket [STAGING_BUCKET_NAME] --trigger-topic cloud-builds

接著讓他跑一下，大約 2 分鐘內就結束了，基本上到這邊為止就完成了，剩下的就是實際測試了～！

測試

測試方法 — 說明

直接到 GCP 上的 Cloud Build，點選紀錄 找到上一篇教學 Google Cloud Build 教學(二)之前所創建好的 image 點遠重新建立 看看會不會發通知到我們的 Slack

點選重新建立，跑一會兒

測試結果

可以看到， Slack 如預期的通知了我們成功的訊息，到這邊就完美的結束結合第三方通知測試結果。

總結
Now Available: GreetBot Plus Free Trial
By: Piotr Bakker
Tags: Slack, Productivity, Human Resources, Teamwork, Chatbots

Now Available: GreetBot Plus Free Trial

The most consistent theme among our customers has always been testing: testing Slack, testing GreetBot, testing onboarding ideas. It makes sense. Digital workspaces are a new frontier and having a bot onboard your new colleagues is, no doubt, a novelty too.

We have always been striving to make this testing easy. Our basic Starter plan has been free since we launched GreetBot in 2016, serving as a de facto free trial. Just add GreetBot to your workspace and off you go. No registration or credit card required.

As our premium subscription plan GreetBot Plus has become more advanced, though, with features like dedicated guest messages and ephemeral channel messages, we’ve realized that offering a free tier wasn’t enough. Our customers needed a simple way to test drive GreetBot Plus itself as well.

This week it’s finally possible: whether you’ve been using GreetBot for years or are just contemplating the idea now, you can take our Plus plan for a spin and not pay a dime. It’s a 14 day, free of charge, no commitment, onboarding bonanza. Just head over to greet.bot/plans to get started.
How to work with Kono on your Slack workspace |Kono.ai
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Slack, Time Management, AI, Technolog

Once you add Kono bot to your slack workspace(https://kono.ai/slack), it allows you to connect your calendar and update your preferences. After then, Kono, your AI assistant will schedule your meetings with your team members 365 days 24/7.

Hello Slack, Meet kono.

Set up ad hoc meetings with your team effortlessly

Set up a meeting with your colleagues

Set up a meeting with your colleagues

Simply tag kono(“@kono”) or use /kono command to schedule meetings.

Set up a meeting at a specific time

@kono schedule a meeting with @emi at 3pm tomorrow.

/kono set up a meeting with @emi at 10am next wednesday.

set up “Q1 report session” meeting with @emi @john at 9:30am next monday. @kono

Set up a meeting over a certain time frame

@kono set up a meeting next week with @mark @daniel

/kono schedule a meeting with @mark @daniel tomorrow

set up “Catch up w/Kono” call with @mark @daniel next week @kono

View your event on calendar without leaving Slack

@kono what do I have for next week?

/kono show my events tomorrow”

Make changes to existing meetings

@kono change the meeting with @kay tmrw.

@kono add @rory to my meeting with @wes next wed.

@kono cancel my meeting with @lucas today.

Creating a calendar invitation takes roughly one to three minutes. With Kono, you can easily set up a conference call or meeting in seconds. Kono bot takes care of tasks for scheduling appointments free up your team members to focus on meatier problems.

What are you waiting for?

Get your smart Scheduling Bot here! https://kono.ai/
writing a slack command bot
By: Tom Van Neerijnen
Tags: Slack, Slackbot

I recently wrote a slack bot that responds to action commands (like /echo yolo ) but I ran into some trouble finding exactly how to do this, so I’m documenting it here for other peeps to find. The exact error I hit was /echo failed with the error "dispatch_failed" .

https://slack.dev/bolt-js/tutorial/getting-started Is a great place to start, but what wasn’t clear to me was how to listen for commands rather than events.

Turns out events covers everything, including commands. Write a simple bolt app:

const { App, LogLevel, ExpressReceiver } = require(' @slack/bolt '); // your url in slack must have the path /slack/events

// path is the same for all types (commands, messages, not just events)

const app = new App({

token: process.env.SLACK_BOT_TOKEN,

logLevel: LogLevel.DEBUG,

signingSecret: process.env.SLACK_SIGNING_SECRET,

}); /* Add functionality here */

app.command('/echo', async ({ command, ack, say }) => {

// Acknowledge command request

await ack();

await say(`${command.text}`);

}); app.error((error) => {

// Check the details of the error to handle cases where you should retry sending a message or stop the app

console.error(error);

}); (async () => {

// Start the app

await app.start(process.env.PORT || 3000); console.log('⚡️ Bolt app is running!');

})();

And set your webhook server’s url, including the /slack/events path, in your slack apps command request URL like so:
ChazBase: A new way to use Slack as Database for MicroServices
By: Raghu Nandy
Tags: NoSQL, Micro Serviceable Moment, Slack, Google Cloud Platform, Ideas

Introduction

My topic today is about an experiment that I did to terraform Slack channels to replace my database needs for a small Short URL (Like bit.ly) application which runs in Google Cloud (AppEngine), for free until I need it for scale.

Problem Space: Who opened my link?

A sales executive wants to know their prospective customer as soon as he opens the link. Can he/she get a message to their slack channel so that one of their executives can initiate a follow-up discussion?

Webhooks vs Web API: (Not real time, but eventual persistence)

Webhooks and APIs are very similar concepts except APIs are similar but Webhooks are criteria based.

Slack and WebHooks can be used for incoming and outgoing chat records.

“So, in a nutshell: The API is where you tell us things and Webhooks is where we tell you things.” Ref

In Wimpy-arc project, we can tune Slack webhooks for eventual persistence. And Cloud App Engine act as a standard PaaS model used just for dynamic web-app and runtime computation.

TIY: Test it yourself if this is what you need:

Here is an example Slack workspace which is preconfigured.

Users can configure the hooks in the chatz records directly, anytime within mobile apps and collaborate.

Workspace URL:

Sharable URL: https://wimpy-arc.appspot.com/example-tiy-1

When you open the above URL, the URL will get redirected to another URL, and after 10 minutes #feeds slack channel gets a message with the request details dump.

Login to Slack and Checkout the Channels: wimpy-arc.slack.com

Login to Slack: wiphy.arc@gmail.com (easypassword)

Request footprint received by #feed channel when someone opens the short link.

DIY:

The DIY project which runs in Google Cloud that gives you free tier apps. With a few steps, you can make it available for your teams. Here is the Wimpy-arc Github ChatzBase prototype project with complete DIY instructions.

Conclusion:

Are you using bit.ly or TinyURL and looking for more data that can elevate your business and your workforce to intuitively take actions.

In a big picture, this architecture is a pseudo architecture which is built on highly adapted platforms such as Slack and Google Cloud. Keep tuned to my blog for more experiments and wimpy architectural debates. Most welcome for critics and comments.

ChatzBase is a concept to terraform existing Chat platforms for new applications without drifting user experience.

Credits: The pictures were inspired from xkcd.com, fonts whatever-it-takes.ttf and sketched by Prashanthi Yeruva
How should I work with a Human-Computer-Human interface?
By: Matt Hagy
Tags: Email, Slack, Tech, Communication

The same way I would with a Human-Human interface.

Photo by Pankaj Patel on Unsplash

Hey, Jeff Bezos, you got a minute? I wanna tell you about my new product idea that I came up with as an intern. Isn’t Slack just a great way for us to communicate, Jeff. Oh, you sound angry. Why don’t you calm down and tell me what you think of my idea?

Jeff, can you really fire me over Slack? Hello, is anyone there? Man, working remote sucks when your laptop dies in the middle of the day for no reason at all.

I guess I better call someone. I wish I knew Jeff Bezos’s number. I bet he could help me get a new laptop. Maybe he could even help me search for a better one all day long. I bet Jeff Bezos would love being an Amazon personal shopper for a day.

Lesson: If you’re not in customer support, then you don’t get interrupted (e.g., slack DM’ed) unless something is actually on fire. And we have an actual fire alarm. You can be a little frustrated when it happens for stupid reasons. Just say, “Yo, I’m in the middle of something. Can you use an email app written for an 8-year-old like GMail?”
Open Redirect in SLACK
Tags: Slack, Open Redirect, Bug Bounty

I discovered an Open Redirect Vulnerability on slack-redir.net . Another low risk bug that i found xD

Step to Reproduce

Go to https://slack-redir.net/link?url=https://abaykan.com/ This will redirect you automatically.

Request

GET /link?url=https://abaykan.com/ HTTP/1.1

Host: slack-redir.net

Connection: close

Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/72.0.3626.96 Safari/537.36

Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8

Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate

Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9,ht;q=0.8,id;q=0.7,so;q=0.6,es;q=0.5

Response

HTTP/1.1 302 Found

Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2019 17:36:15 GMT

Server: Apache

Vary: Accept-Encoding

location: https://abaykan.com/

Content-Length: 0

Connection: close

Content-Type: text/html

X-Via: haproxy-www-ok5p

Unfortunately I got an error while trying to inject XSS.

Suggested Fix

https://github.com/OWASP/CheatSheetSeries/blob/master/cheatsheets/Unvalidated_Redirects_and_Forwards_Cheat_Sheet.md

Impact

The attacker can redirect the victim to the malicious site using legit slack-redir.net domain name, which can be the copy of the real site, asking for the user credentials.

But because of special conditions (security policy) from SLACK, this report is considered invalid (Not Applicable).
Automatically Scan Your Slack Workspaces for Confidential Information
By: Jashan Preet Singh
Tags: Management, Slack, Collaboration, Cybersecurity, Programming

The Solution (Slack Watchman)

You need something to keep a constant eye on your Slack workspace. Slack Watchman uses APIs provided by Slack to search for potentially sensitive data exposed in your Slack workspaces.

Here’s a detailed explanation:

Too lazy to read?

Slack Watchman uses the Slack API to query your workspace for:

Externally shared channels.

Potential leaked passwords.

AWS keys.

GCP keys.

Google API keys.

Slack API keys & webhooks.

Twitter API Keys.

Facebook API Keys.

Private keys.

Secret Keys.

Paypal Braintree tokens.

Bank card details.

Certificate files.

Potentially interesting/malicious files (.docm, .xlsm, .zip etc.).

Passport numbers.

Dates of birth.

Paypal Braintree tokens.

Bank card details.

The querying is totally dynamic, you can ask your Personal Slack Watchman to only look for things you think are suspicious and rest will be ignored. So, you have the power of keeping a close on things that matters the most.

Slack Watchman can also output a list of all channels, users, and admins of your workspace so that you can audit for any uninvited guest in your Slack workspace.

You can run Slack Watchman to look for results going back as far as:

24 hours

7 days

30 days

All-time

The best way is to perform an all-time full scan at the time of installation and then keep scanning every 24 hours or 7 days.

The results are stored in a CSV file that you can review and can take action on.
Slagora- “Statistically Amazing”
By: Pranav Uppal
Tags: Slack, Gci

“What is “Slagora”? It is a revolutionary slack app that makes decision taking process fairly simpler, by adding the the feature to create interactive polls.

W hat does Slagora do? / Why Slagora?

Slagora is a ready-made Slack application that enables teams to create interactive polls using preferential voting algorithms.

Slagora makes it extremely easy to create polls and take informed decisions collectively. This reduces trivial debate and makes the overall functioning of your organization much more efficient, which allows you to gain an upper-hand in this fast-paced world.

Getting onto the technical aspects of Slagora-

Slagora is unbelievably light-weight for an app. Along with that it’s really fast. Slagora makes use of the Agora vote counting library which has been proven to be one of the fastest and the most accurate libraries used to count votes in a poll or election.

Slagora is user-friendly. With a simple UI and easy to remember slash(/) commands, any Slack user can easily interact with Slagora.

Slagora is powerful. Slagora can handle a huge number of polls/elections without breaking a sweat and readily provide results when necessary.

Slagora is secure. Data stored in Slagora is not shared with any third party and across different teams in slack even if the user is a member of the other teams.

Saving the best for the last, Slagora is fully Free and Open-Source. Which means it is always updating and improving. Being Open-Sourced enables anyone to look for and fix security flaws. And since it’s peer-reviewed, it opens the software up to a large base of inspectors who can quickly detect issues. In fact, many open source solutions are much more secure than proprietary Internet Information servers.

To make this even simpler, the app is extremely effortless to set up and use, so easy that I will demonstrate below how to set up the app and use it.

Super simple guide on how to set up Slagora-
Build a Custom Slack + Airtable Task Management Application
By: Janeth Ledezma Graziani
Tags: Slack, Productivity, Technology, API, Project Management

Prepare your Airtable Base

Once you log in to Airtable, copy this base by clicking the link and select the workspace you’d like to add the base to:

https://airtable.com/addBaseFromShare/shrDjE80mXmDexLfM?utm_source=airtable_shared_application

Install Slack App Using Autocode

Now copy my Slack app template using this link:

https://autocode.stdlib.com/github/JanethL/TaskManagerBot/?filename=README.md

Sign in or create a free account. If you have a Standard Library account, click Already Registered and sign in using your Standard Library credentials.

Give your project a unique name and select Start API Project from Github:

Fork Code from Github

Autocode automatically sets up a project scaffold to save your project as an API endpoint.

To deploy your API to the cloud, navigate through the functions/events/scheduler folders on the left and select weekly.js file.

Enter weekly.js

Click Accounts Required

Select the red Account Required button, which will prompt you to link Slack and Airtable accounts.

Link Resources

Let’s start by linking a Slack Resource. Select Link New Resource to link a new Slack app.

Install Standard Library App

You should see an OAuth popup. Select the workspace you’d like to install your Slack app in, and click Allow.

Click Allow

Give your Slack app a name and image if you’d like.

Select Finish

Select Finish. Next select Link Resource to connect to your Airtable account by following the instructions on the modal to retrieve your Airtable API Key and select finish.

Link Airtable

Find and select your base and click Finish.

Pick an Airtable base

The green checkmarks confirm that you’ve linked your accounts properly. Select Finished Linking.

Select Finished Linking

You’re ready to deploy your Slack App! Select Deploy in the bottom-left of the file manager.

Deploy App

Continue

Your Slack App is now available for use in the Slack workspace you authorized it.

The final step is to populate the Members Airtable with active members in your workspace by running /cmd getmembers from any channel in Slack. You can then select the team members you’d like to have your app message.

🙌🏼 Your Slack task manager is all set!
Is Newfund useful?
By: Augustin Sayer
Tags: Statistics, Slack, Venture Capital, Entrepreneurs, Reporting

Operating Partners

Newfund now counts four full time operating partners dedicated to our startups.

Zoé Mohl, Patrick Malka, Fred Krebs, and Henri Deshays

Fréderic Krebs: Former CEO of Allocine, spends his time on marketing and communication of our portfolio startups. Concrete example: knows how to find the right partner/agency; gives his own input from the most trivial questions like an adwords campaign to the more complex issues that keep founders up at night like pricing and product positioning.

Henri Deshays: Our US Partner but also our US expert. Said startup wants to move to the US: Henri will assess the likelihood of moving and accompany the startup through the different hoops of a transatlantic expansion. Henri will also help the company draft an equity story to increase chances of a successful follow-on fundraising round in the US.

Patrick Malka: Co-founder of Newfund and ex-auditor (EY), CFO & CEO of listed companies. Helps startups structure their growth, get the figures to pilot the company and build the management team.

Zoe Mohl: With a background in investment banking at JP Morgan San Francisco and strategy consulting working on due diligences in New York, Zoe is our strategy expert. She works around the clock to assist founders with any kind of transaction..

Each has their own area of expertise and is always available to help. But how do they remain up to date on the portfolio companies so as to avoid wasting entrepreneurs’ precious time?
Help your construction site managers focus on field activities, rather than processing and entering data.
By: Max Karionov
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Messenger Bots, Slack, Construction, Project Management

I’ve spent the last 12 years in construction, benchmarking field productivity and talking to the field guys. All this time, the amount of data collected from construction sites has been increasing year by year. Solving the problem of having the necessary data for decision making, the project offices increasingly forced field managers to enter structured data into various systems.

As a result, superintendents and foremen spend up to 30% of their time processing, reporting, and entering data.

From time to time, we had to “fight” with the construction site managers, because they refused to provide the necessary data. They could be understood, the volume of tasks, especially at the end of the project, just did not allow them to do it. They simply sent a message to Slack or phoned the project manager and passed the data they needed. All attempts to close messengers for transmitting data often ended up not successfully, they simply did not have time to do it differently.

The good news is that new opportunities have opened up in technologies. I’m talking about Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning(ML).

Natural Language Processing

Just leave your construction managers alone, let them report and request information directly in the messenger, email or by phone, and, using PLM and ML, Buildout.ai will recognize the context and named entities in the body of these messages and create documents directly in the project management system (Procore or Plangrid) without manual entry.

A significant part of documents: RFIs, daily reports, punch lists, etc. can be created directly from the regular text or even voice messages.

Just give 30% of the time back to your field managers.
Capture the best of 2019 on Slack
By: Octo Technology Australia
Tags: Slack, Google Drive, Photos

Upload photos to Google Drive automatically using PhotoStash

Like many companies, we spend a lot of time communicating through Slack for many purposes: asking for help, sharing fun moments, making reports, making jokes, replying to jokes, official announcements… you get the idea.

Using Slack is great, but we faced a problem. How can we store photos in a way that is easy to retrieve later on? Because as part of our DNA we really like spending time together and we take a bunch of photos together. We organise a party night each month, prepare coding nights every 2 months, and we also host a weekend away holiday once a year. That means there’s a lot of shared moments of fun (not to mention the Christmas party) — and we use Slack to share all of these moments.

And I’m sure there a lot of companies doing this!

But when it comes to reusing the content, sometimes it’s not that easy. We like to create and share fun stuff like “memes”, videos, articles and more … sometimes we print photos and put them around the office. In the past we used to share this content in two ways, directly on Slack or after the event via Google Drive. If we wanted to refer to the photos later on usually someone would create a folder in Google Drive, and then we would post the link onto Slack and remind everyone multiple times to upload their photos. It was a hassle, and not everyone can be bothered to manually upload photos.

That is, until now…

Introducing PhotoStash. We created PhotoStash to automatically upload photos from the channels it is invited to — it’s a Slack bot connected to Google Drive that can conveniently store your photos. Just install the bot, and invite it as a member to any (or all) of the channels you want to stash photos from. Every time you share a photo it will be uploaded to Google Drive. Easy!

So far it seems to be working well — try it out (it’s free and available on the Slack marketplace) and please let us know what you think : )
Zabbix-Slack Integration
By: Sujeet Jha
Tags: Zabbix Slack Integration, Slack, Zabbix, Zabbix Slack

Create/Launch a server ( I have taken ubuntu 20)

Install Zabbix server 5.4. from below link: https://www.zabbix.com/download?zabbix=5.4&os_distribution=ubuntu&os_version=20.04_focal&db=mysql&ws=apache

Slack webhook

link : https://www.zabbix.com/integrations/slack

create a workspace in slack

Create a new channel in your workspace. you can name it anything.

Other fields are optional

Click on browse app

Now click on App Directory

Now go to build

Click on Create a custom app

Select From scratch

You can name it any and select your workspace in another Field. And click on Create App.

Click on Bots

Click on Review Scope to add

Scroll down Under the bot scopes token, Click Add an OAuth Scope

Select chat: write in the drop-down

Scroll up and click on Install to workspace

Click allow

Copy the OAuth Token

Go to your Zabbix server. Click on slack under Administration → Media types

Paste copied bot token and click update

Find Global Macros under Administation →General →Macros and click on it

update global macros add Zabbix server URL in global macro

Go to Administration Users → media and add media. in type filed select slack, Provide channel name as below. ex: #zabbix and choose severity on which you want the alerts.

Check for action → Trigger action. it should be enabled. if not make this enable

Invite app in your channel

Now you will start receiving alert.

Congratulation your Zabbix-slack integration is done

Contact me : sujeetengg1@gmail.com

POST CREDITS/HELPFUL LINK:
Building Cohesive and Performant Remote Teams
By: Reddy Babu Adarapu
Tags: Leadership, Slack, Collaboration, Team Building, Remote

The first challenge was dealing with multiple timezones. In the past, I have dealt with three timezones, especially on the opposite sides of the globe. The work was divided in such a way that there is a little or no overlap between the timezones and regular sync ups used to help align teams across geographies. In this company, the timezones were not like before, but overlapped between two to four hours. The nature of work required close collaboration between team members with different specializations on a daily basis. Do I overload my day by starting early and ending late to cater to all timezones? Is that sustainable?

The second challenge was the selection of appropriate tools to communicate and collaborate for a given context . In my previous jobs, I used email as the first medium of communication, which resulted in a havoc of emails to catchup. The last few minutes of my day were spent to catchup on emails and respond. It was difficult to figure out which email required my immediate attention during the day. In this company, Slack was used as a primary tool to communicate, but the deluge is in the form of messages popping up in different channels. How do I deal with the flood of notifications? When do I use Slack, email, zoom, or a shared document?

The next challenge was how to connect and build relations with each individual who I work with on a daily basis. Additionally, I had to discover methods to connect each other while bringing community purpose. It is important to build a cohesive team where people know each other well including their strengths and weaknesses while also trusting and supporting each other when needed. Team lunches, water cooler conversations, informal discussions, and hallway conversations used to facilitate bonding with each other in an office setup. How will I address this challenge with remote teams? Do I meet over zoom with everyone everyday?

The last challenge that I encountered and want to highlight is, how to build a performant team where people collaborate, share and communicate on design and architectural changes in a way that is as effective as being present in office. What is the alternative for white boarding, walking to a team member who is in your neighboring pod, and huddling up in a meeting room to quickly align?

How do you deal with such challenges at your work? Share your thoughts in the comments, while I prepare my next blog in this series that focuses on each challenge and how I addressed it.
Meet Stuart. A Slack love child.
By: Greg Tracy
Tags: Slack, Bots, Hacking

Note: this was originally published on another platform in May 2014

We’ve been using Slack at Propeller for about six months now. And like most teams, we love it. Lots of folks have have written about why they love it and we enjoy it for all of the same reasons. Less email. More transparency. And more collaboration.

But what I love the most are the integrations. The list of integrations is growing every day and they’ve made them as easy as hotdogs to setup. Github, Google Docs and Trello are my favorite stock integrations. However, the glue that is the most compelling are the open ended ones — inbound and outbound webhooks and custom slash commands. You can connect these to do anything your imagination can dream up.

I’ve used each of these to do a variety of hacks to both trash talk and educate the team. While powerful, it can turn into a random Lego project after a bit of time with pieces bolted on in all sorts of forms. I wanted an extensible bot framework that was just as easy to setup and extend as the native integrations inside of Slack.

I set out to fix this. Stuart was born and he lives in a Node.js server.

By himself, Stuart won’t do anything. He does make it a snap to plug in directly to your Slack instance by writing only two functions for bi-directional communication with your team, and only one function if you’d like to inject messages into the conversation from the background.

Slash command integration

Your team can talk to Stuart through his slash command, /stuart. You can add new functions to his slash command by defining the definition in the plugins.json spec and writing two functions — run() and help().

For example,

/stuart conference

/stuart conference 37821

… will dynamically create a Twilio conference room for you. You can customize the passcode as well and Stuart will shutdown the line for you a week later.

Stuart will even give you lunch recommendations using Yelp, /stuart food pizza

Cron — automated background tasks

The Cron tasks make it really easy to do background tasks and push result into the team’s conversations. Reporting the morning weather is a simple example, but it’s easy to build custom tasks that tie into your own back end.

For example, at the start of each week, Stuart reports in on the trend for new accounts being created inside Propeller. He also shares statistics about how many people interacted with the weekly email, how many users are syncing their sensors with Apple v. Android, and how our awesome new sensor is performing.

The potential integrations are boundless for your team. And it only takes two functions to extend him.

Get started.

Update : I failed to mention Stuart’s bonus feature. If you connect the Twilio integration, you can talk to your team with the Stuart persona by sending him text messages. He’ll also update you with messages in the event someone mentions his name.
Top 5 Tools to Improve Your Web Development Workflow
By: Allie Cohen
Tags: Startup, Slack, Web Development Tools, Web Development, Trello

Being software developers, before we deploy the application following modern web application development principles, we must use tools to organize day to day internal workflow efficiently. Tools can help you improve your productivity dramatically and make a complex project so easy and convenient to maintain. You will be surprised to know that a major part of the web application development includes being a Jr. software developer to Sr. software developer is the adaption of tools that make the communication seamless, simplify the task management and create a perfect harmony between you and other team members.

I am writing this blog as per my experience that why you should create workflows that are easy to adapt, scale, and maintain by most software developers that will join your team. In order to master productive workflows, we need to master how to implement it at ourselves first.

So, let me introduce the right set of tools that web application developers are using on a daily basis analyze, manage and maintain their projects. There are chances that you might be familiar with some of these tools, but my goal is to get you familiar that why you should use these tools and why tools are considered as web developer’s best friend.

#1 Slack ( https://slack.com/)

Slack is so far one of the best communication tools, a new and seamless way to communicate with the internal team, define goals, discuss issues, schedule meetings and many more other things can be done using Slack.

#2 Trello (https://trello.com/)

Trello is widely used to manage development workflow as well as tasks, blogs, online business and more. Even a solo developer running his/her side project, Trello is a perfect tool because of its simplistic and minimalistic user interface. Trello is ideal for managing up to 10 team members.

Redash is an open-source tool that is integrated with most popular data sources like MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, ElasticSearch and much more in a dedicated dashboard. With Redash, you can have great visualizations and track milestones to keep your team engaged with what is going on with your project.

#4 BitBucket ( https://bitbucket.org/ )

It’s a version control system developed by Atlassian, which owns Jira, HipChat, Trello and more great products for developers. Just like Github, BitBucket provides private repositories for upto 5 users and its completely free.

#5 Draw.io

Draw.io is one of the best tools for prototyping, architecture and mock-ups design. Its an add-on for Google Drive that offers easy insertion into a sketch. It’s completely free and I want you to give it a try in your next project, while in the designing stage.
Top 12 Slack Apps To Boost Your Team’s Productivity
By: Jose Granja
Tags: Slack, Software Development, Productivity, Programming, Web Development

Top 12 Slack Apps To Boost Your Team’s Productivity

Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash

Slack was born in 2013. Despite having a rough start, being hacked in 2015, they succeeded in becoming the world’s go-to solution for team communication.

Why did they have such success? Prior to Slack tools like Google talk and Skype were used for Team Communication. Why were they bad? Because they were not built with that purpose. Slack, on the other hand, was built specifically for team collaboration and communication.

So why is the platform so good? What does it provide?

Workflows : Provides a no-code solution to automate routine tasks, using predefined triggers and steps.

: Provides a no-code solution to automate routine tasks, using predefined triggers and steps. Slack apps: Uses a range of APIs to access much deeper levels of customization. They will provide features and integrations that are not built into the platform.

Slack provide its own trusted marketplace where you can install and remove apps. Adding apps to your is workspace becomes easy and intuitive.

So, are you making the most of Slack? What can it do to improve your productivity? Can it automate your manual workflows? Here we will look at the top 12 apps to help your team become more efficient and reliable.
How does Whyse dynamise the activity of Teck.Rocks community?
Tags: Startup, Sharing Economy, Tech, Slack, Knowledge

Tech.Rocks is the largest community of Tech Leaders in France.

This initiative launched by Francis Nappez (CTO@Blablacar), Dimitri Baeli (CTO@LesFurets.com), Nicolas Silberman (former CTO@Mediapart) and Cyril Pierre de Geyer (CEO@Rocker School) makes it possible to gather, connect and valorise Tech Leaders, hence allowing their mutual growth.

Whyse x Tech.Rocks

A few months ago, Tech.Rocks chose to integrate Whyse into their community with two objectives.

The first was to create bonds and encourage dialogue between members.

The second was to allow members to benefit from a shared knowledge base that could bring together their community’s capabilities.

Generating commitment…

The Whyse platform and its extensions — especially Slack — has proven its ability to generate strong commitment in the communities where the product is involved.

Within the Tech.Rocks network on Whyse, the active user rate is of +50%/month, and has been so for over 6 months.

through the creation of bonds…

This is mostly due to targeting technology. As soon as a problem is published, Whyse identifies the relevant contact points. Whyse then wisely introduces members who can exchange ideas. Within this community, the issues raised now find their answers in +90% of cases!

By playing on a sense of belonging, sharing and user-friendliness, Whyse is becoming the central link to generate bonds in communities.

“It is necessary for decision makers to share experiences with each other. Whyse wants to be the place for exchanges and learning processes” — Francis Nappez (CTO@Blablacar and Founder@TechRocks).

while allowing a shared knowledge base to be built

With Whyse, all exchanges feed a knowledge base that can be activated by everyone. This way, each piece of advice provided can be used by everyone in the future.

In 6 months, through Whyse, Tech.Rocks has built a database of +500 Q&As fed by +300 different members addressing various themes (technical, organisational, tools…).

This asset — fortified daily — allows the member to share a comprehensive knowledge base that can be used by everyone.

Are you seeking to develop your community too? Contact us at contact@whyse.co

The Whyse team
This is how Slack went from 0 to $1B without having a chief marketing officer
By: Ali Eskandari
Tags: Marketing, Startup, Slack, Digital Marketing, Product

This is how Slack went from 0 to $1B without having a chief marketing officer Ali Eskandari Follow Feb 9 · 2 min read

The story of how Slack after just eight months become a unicorn by listening to customers without a CMO or any big marketing budget.

Stewart Butterfield

Vancouver, Canada.

Stewart already is a famous entrepreneur because of his contribution to building Flickr.

He decided to build a game.

Stewart invites Cal, Flickr’s chief software architect, and Flickr employees Eric and Serguei.

They kickstarted Glitch.

His team used Internet Relay Chat to communicate.

This way they (for a while) cope with the challenges of teamwork across multiple time zones.

It didn’t take long for Stewart and his team to realize Internet Relay Chat wasn’t up to the task.

They needed something better.

Stewart decided to start building their own communications tool.

They started working on the app at the end of 2012.

Stewart said,

We started inviting teams in batches and watched what happened. Then we made some changes, watched what happened, made some more changes…

By May of 2013, Slack was preparing for extraordinary growth.

And after just 8 months, they hit $1B valuations.

BOOM!

Without a CMO. Without any big marketing campaign.

From the get-go, Slack leverages the help ticket system as an opportunity to solidify loyalty.

Listening to customers, then building accordingly, is in the DNA of Slack.

Every customer's touchpoint is a marketing opportunity.

Don’t guess.

Don’t build stuff for a fictional customer in your head.

“Make Something People Want”

Marketing isn’t yelling. Great marketing is listening.

This is how you can get started:

Implement a survey when people want to leave your website, and ask, “What things stopping you to “here write your desired action” now?

Try block 30 minutes every week to talk with your loyal/ideal customers

Find out with user research (or your sales and customer support team) what is the most frequent questions people ask and answer them earlier in the buyer journey

You don’t need to be perfect, you just need to roll out a good thing and then based on people’s feedback improve it.

PS … subscribe to this baby and every Friday I’II send you a story about how to fascinate and how to create great experiences.