In fact, 77% of the Fortune 100 uses Slack. 1-1000+ users Notion is a tool for teams and companies that want a better way to manage knowledge, projects, documents, and collaboration. Individuals can also use the product for notes and organizing their lives. Coda begins with a blinking cursor and grows as big as your team's ambition. We've seen Coda docs do everything from run weekly meetings, to launch products. Linear helps streamline software projects, sprints, tasks, and bug tracking. It's built for high-performance teams.
Slack seems to have been taking the corporate and startup collaboration world by storm in the past year or so.
The popular communication and chat service for businesses has not only secured a huge installed user base, but is also already valuated in the billions (around 3 of them, to be exact). We even use it internally here at TalentLMS headquarters — which obviously is the ultimate seal of approval for any piece of software.
Its success makes sense too. Compared to the awful legacy of bloated, slow and hard to use business collaboration tools, Slack is as lightweight and easy to use as Facebook or Twitter, with most of the features most teams need, and few that they might not. It even manages to instill a sense of playfulness to the whole office communication process too, with its funny emojis, reactions, custom startup messages, and the rest.
And another trick up its sleeve is the ease with which it can integrate with other enterprise services, from a retail company’s CRM to an order fulfillment software, to an IT company’s source code repository system.
Of course, your favorite eLearning management platform wouldn’t miss the party. Leveraging TalentLMS’ hooks to the meta-integration service Zapier, you can start integrating TalentLMS and Slack and have them exchange messages and chat up lines like old buddies in no time.
Let’s see how…
Zapier what?
If you have already attempted integrating TalentLMS with a third party service, you’ve probably already made the acquaintance of Zapier.
In that’s the case, you can skip this section. If you haven’t, then here’s all you need to know:
Zapieris a “mediator”, a third party Cloud-based service for easily connecting different platforms and have them work together.
Zapier integrations work using the notion of triggers (“when this thing happens”) and actions (“do that other thing”).
When something happens on a piece of software (e.g. a user is added in TalentLMS) it “triggers” an “action” to another software (e.g. e.g. register the same user in Slack too). Such a combination of trigger and action is called a “Zap” in Zapier-speak.
What’s best, you only have to write a trigger or an action once, and it will work with any software that sends compatible data (e.g. a TalentLMS “user added” trigger could invoke the same “add user” action in WordPress, Magento, ZenDesk, JIRA, Slack, and much more — Zapier offers integrations with 500+ apps).
Slack features accessible through Zapier
Slack offers the following triggers and actions:
Slack Triggers:
• New Message Posted Anywhere: Triggers when a new message is posted to any public channel.
• New Message Posted to Channel: Triggers when a new message is posted to a specific channel you choose.
• New Starred Message: Triggers when you star a message.
• New Channel: Triggers whenever a new channel is created.
• New User: Triggers when a new Slack user is created and first joins your organization.
Slack Actions:
• Send Channel Message: Post a new message to a specific channel.
• Send Direct Message: Send a direct message to a user or yourself from the Slackbot.
• Set Channel Topic: Sets the topic on a channel.
• Create Channel: Creates a new channel
• Send Private Channel Message: Post a new message to a private channel.
• Find Message: Finds a Slack message using the Slack Search feature.
• Find User by Email: Finds a user by matching against their email.
• Find User by Name: Finds a user by matching against their real name.
Example Slack and TalentLMS integration
Integrating TalentLMS with Slack starts with triggers and actions – any matching ones can be integrated into TalentLMS.
In this short guide we’re going to combine the “Course Completed (User Details) TalentLMS trigger with the “Send Channel Message” Slack action, so that when a user completes a course in TalentLMS, a message will be posted to a specific Slack channel.
1) In Zapier, create a new Zap and give it a name (e.g. “Slack/Zapier”).
2) Now you need to choose the trigger app. Start typing “TalentLMS” on the search bar, and choose “TalentLMS” from the options shown.
3) Now you need to choose the trigger itself. In this case, you shall pick the “Course Completed (User Details)” trigger — the one that is executed when a user you have specified by login/id completes a TalentLMS course.
4) If you have not already started integrating TalentLMS account with Zapier you will be asked to do so now.
Provide the credentials required for your TalentLMS account to be connected. Your shall need your TalentLMS domain (the url of your eLearning site) and API key. The latter can be found in the Account & Settings > Basic settings > Security page (you could have also done this in advance from your “Connected Accounts” Zapier page).
Once you have done so, you can test that you account is connected properly and you are ready to move on to the next step.
5) The next step would be to setup the user for whom you want to get their completed courses. Use the dropdown menu which gives your the option to select among your TalentLMS users.
6) Similarly to step (2), you now you need to select your action app — that app that will respond to the “Course Completed” TalentLMS event. In our case, this will be Slack.
Start typing Slack… in the search bar, and select Slack from the options shown.
7) Now pick the Slack action you want to run. This will be “Send Channel Message” — the one that posts a new message to a specific Slack #channel you choose…
8) Similarly to how you authorized Zapier to connect to TalentLMS in step (4) you need to also authorize it to connect to your Slack account. Once you have done this, you can test that the connection was setup properly.
9) The final step is for helping Zapiertranslate the user information it gets from TalentLMS to the field names that Slack understands.
Select the channel that you want your message to be posted in and also setup the message that you want to post.
Assume a message like the following “User: Nick Smith (nicksmith) completed the course: Future Technologies”. You can setup a template for these kind of messages similar to how it shows in the screenshot.
And that’s it. You now have a working Slack to TalentLMS user account creation integration.
Don’t be put off by the lengthy description above — it’s more verbose than difficult to follow.
Test that you Zap works as it is supposed to:
and finally give a name and set it on… That’s it. You’ve done it!
Following the same trigger and action logic you can hook up any other functionality you want between Slack and TalentLMS (and the other way around of course, as TalentLMS is itself a trigger provider too).
Conclusion
In this post we had a look at look at the process of integrating TalentLMS with Slack, the increasingly popular (and fun to use) business collaboration platform.
This, of course, is but one of the tons of integrations that TalentLMSoffers, either natively, or through Zapier. If you haven’t yet, take TalentLMS for a test drive today and see how well our best-of-breed eLearning solution integrates with your training needs!
Save time, frustration and money with TalentLMS, the most-affordable and user-friendly learning management system on the market. Try it for free for as long as you want and discover why our customers consistently give us 4.5 stars (out of 5!)
| Tags: LMS Integration
Presented by OutSystems
In 2020, Slack nearly doubled its paying customer base over the previous year, thanks to the pandemic, and was recently acquired by Salesforce for over $27 billion. But according to Justin Hardin, senior software engineer at Slack, the product originally started as a gaming platform that failed to take off.
“They unfortunately ran out of money and had to lay people off, so they pivoted by asking, ‘Which piece of our product works?’ And that was the chat aspect,” Hardin says on the latest episode of Decoded, OutSystems’ podcast for the next generation of developers.
But the app’s friendly human tone was inspired by its gaming roots.
Notion Integrations
“They kept the writer on who was creating the dialogues for the games, and instead had her do the dialogues for the product,” he says. “That’s how you have this enterprise chat platform with help messages and onboarding that’s in a more conversational tone, which helped define the product experience.”
Building a global experience
Since Slack’s early pivot, Hardin says that Slack has been very intentional in the way it has expanded internationally. In addition to creating server caches around the world to reduce latency, Slack localizes completely when entering new markets. The product team, marketing team, enterprise team, app store team, and others all localize the entire Slack experience to ensure it’s relevant to every user, no matter where they are.
“We localize not just the language itself, but also the imagery and graphics to make sure it’s contextual to the countries we’re in,” he says. “We make sure the blog isn’t only localized, but empower marketers from each country to create their own articles targeted at their specific market.”
Hardin believes this reflects the fact that technology is becoming less centered around Silicon Valley.
Notion Onenote
“Slack is a very American-based company, but that’s not how the world is going to see tech moving on in the future,” he explains. “Tech should be a global entity, not just a Silicon Valley thing. In a post-pandemic world, the whole notion of Silicon Valley should exist on the internet. It shouldn’t be a specific place.”
Slack And Notion Vs
Winning with consistency
Thanks to its commitment to creating an intuitive UI and human experience, Slack originally found success among developer teams at companies. This led to adoption at businesses ranging from small startups to Amazon, and then spread through other functions like marketing, sales, and finance. To ensure Slack is relevant and useful to all types of users, Hardin says their team focuses on providing a consistent experience above all else.
“How can we make our front end through the product and the marketing site consistent? How can we have a design system? How can we utilize components?” he says. “That’s where I see Slack as being kind of an innovator in this space: how can you bring consistency? Some of it is through getting everyone on the same page, but other times it’s through how you create toolings that allow developers to not think about this.”
With more people than ever using Slack as they work from home, Hardin says this consistency, along with rigorous testing, is what has helped the company scale to meet growing demand. The result is a product that people love so much and has been so successful that it’s news when the product has an issue.
“When things don’t go well, we’re trending on Twitter.”
Check out this week’s Decoded podcast to learn much more about how Justin Hardin started his career in software development, his work at Slack, and his work as the co-founder of Climatebase.org, a platform for climate action, education, and impact.
Listen now, and subscribe to future episodes today.
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