Over the past few months, companies have rushed to enable stable work from home environments. This often begins with the selection of a worthwhile technology in which admins play a key role in choosing. Slack recently made things easier for its admins to gain valuable skills for the next generation of jobs, introducing the Slack Certified program. The program is available online for qualified candidates, and after completing the program, participants receive a badge from Slack, increasing their credibility in the Slack admin space. “It could also improve the job prospects for Slack customer organizations, system integration partners, and more.”
Admins can take their knowledge of the platform to the next level and get certified in Slack, which will remain key in the further adoption of Slack. As the demand for experienced Slack admins increases, having champions inside an organization can become even more critical. If customers know your staff possesses a deep and burning knowledge of the platform, trust can be built and wider system adoption of Slack along with its channel based-messaging efforts it hopes will replace email – could catch on.
“Thousands of Slack customers, including Oracle, IBM, and Verizon, already have dedicated roles for Slack admins to drive and standardize agile ways of working at scale”
Slack introduced several new features that translate engagement within the platform into actionable insights. Find out things like message activity (available for Slack Plus and Grid customers). It pulls together rich data on the reach, impact, and engagement of Slack messages, allowing for more informed business decisions. Slack released a new set of analytics APIs (available for paid Grid plans). The APIs integrate Slack engagement data with business reporting tools and enable admins to bring Slack usage data into their existing dashboards.
More than 150,000 teams currently integrate their calendar apps with Slack, which helps to reduce the amount of time spent toggling between tabs by making the tools accessible via Slack. Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar apps for Slack bring a user’s meeting invites and schedule into Slack so it’s easy to stay on top of their time. Before a meeting starts users get an alert and joining a meeting is as simple as clicking a link from within Slack.
“Now, admins can increase adoption of these apps at an accelerated pace. Instead of requiring each employee to authenticate their account, admins can automatically authorize calendar apps (available for all plans) across the company in a few steps”
SoFi, an online personal finance company with over 1,500 employees, experienced a 790 percent increase in weekly Google Calendar users after using domain authentication to automatically set up calendar apps, Slack wrote in the blog post announcing its latest features. Finally, managing manual tasks just got simpler, thanks to new centralized channel management (available for Grid plans). This means, there’s now a single dashboard that lets you view and manage channels across an organization, give permissions, archive, edit, etc. That is if you’re a Slack Admin.
