Slack - The complete Quick-Start Guide

1. Course Goals: Hello and welcome to this slag tutoria in which I'm going to show you step by step, how you can use slag. Paired with some best practices from my own experience. Also paired with some productivity hacks. First of all, what is slack? Slack is basically a platform on which you can replace e mails. It's a collaborative tool where your entire company or your team can communicate with in threads similar to a forum like Read It, for example. Where there are certain participants talking about a specific topic. In threads where the information stays, just think of how you use, for example, read it. Sometimes you are searching for solution to problems. So you go to the Internet, you search it, and you find the information you see. Also the evolving discussion behind maybe then not the last post, but somewhere in between, You find a solution from where you can derive your solution. This is slack. Slack is basically an enclosed space. Obviously not everyone on planet Earth has access to it. But it's enclosed space where only your team or your company has access to and you can organize yourself in different threads, which is beautiful in terms of you have the entire discussion history, we have multiple search tools. Information stays there can be edited later on. So if you see, for example, that a specific message was super important, you refine it, you can pin this into a specific channel. Potentially, you can use that information to onboard others into the channel, into the topic, or into your team. By that, it's just a successful and also efficient alternative. For example, to Outlook, or to mail to whatever E mail client you're using. In order to make the most out of this, out of these features, I want to show you basically all the functions, all the features of slag in detail in the course. In this lecture, we're going to talk about basically the entire system. We talk about workspace, we talk about channels, the threads in which you organize information. I will show you how to create and react to messages. I will show you all the settings that you can do on your personal account, but also as an administrator of the entire slack count in your company. I will show you how you can also replace tools like Zoom tool, Skype for example, to make voice calls or to have group calls. Group chats. And I'm also going to show you automations such as chat bots where you can make slag work for you to reply to frequently asked questions. For example, I will also show you how I use workflows. I will show you also how you can integrate your legacy application, for example, Outlook, Azara, many.com or Google Drive into slag so that you can, for example, shift information around. I mean, it's of course unrealistic that from one moment to the other, from 1 second to the other, unless your corporation already uses slag to an extensive amount, you're going to replace e mails with slack. You're going to have two sources of communication. You will have other tools in which you specifically manage information. I want to show you how you can transform the information and synchronize the information between those tools in app integrations. Of course, I'm giving you tips and tricks along the way how you can best make use of all the slack features. This course is built in a story line which means you can learn at your own pace. We start from scratch and add with every lecture more functionality towards your slack competency. Add new features. By that you're entirely free in how to use the course. You can either go straight from zero to the end to 100% of this course and then try out, you can just try out your own skills with slack and then look certain things up in, um, you have your lifetime access to all the resources, which means basically you are free to refer back to any of the resources later on at your own pace. Without further, let's just start and jump directly into it. Have fun and enjoy. 2. What is slack?: I know you're now impatiently waiting to learn about slack. But first of all, let's just stick a pole on the ground to see what slack can do for you when you use it properly. I just want to give you a quick high level update based on what I just told you and what you're going to learn. How does it look actually in the reality as I showed you explained you already is that slack is organized. Read for example, an enclosed space in which you can share topic wise the information. The way you do that is basically in channels. Channels are your threads where you have the information organized around the topic. There are basically like two channels. There are public channels, like public in terms of your entire workspace, so everyone in your company can access these channels. Or you have enclosed ones, for example, for your team internal communication or any communication that is not suited for public. For example, if you have any data privacy things, you need to discuss any HR topics, then you can do that in these enclosed topics. You, of course, have also the option to do some direct messaging with other team members. You can include applications into your workflow where you can transform information or shift information between different tools. You also have the option to, for example, make a call with a group like everyone who is subject to a channel can participate in a team call. But you can also do direct calls in your direct messages with your peers. This is what's great about slack. Another great feature is that whenever you join a new project or a new channel, see the entire history of the channel. So you can read through it, you can search for certain information. In particular, if you're the channel owner and think there's information that you are frequently asked about, you think this is worth for everyone reading it, you can pin that into the channel so that for example, then everyone who comes into the channel needs to go through the pinned information first to understand how the channel operates or where the most basic information is, where it's located and how to find it. This is just a snapshot, a glimpse of what slack can do and what makes it for me is super valuable tool where I save hours and hours every week using slack instead of e mails. Because the information is there. Because anyone can go in here and search for the information that they need. In this lecture, I just want to give you this inspiration on where we are heading, what you're going to learn, and what value this tool we're bringing to you once you apply all of that. In the next lectures, we're going to drill down onto the individual functions, what we do here, and how we do it. 3. Quick start Guide!: The most important feature of slack is obviously the communication. I want to kick it off by helping you to set up your first channel. And your first message that you know that right from the beginning how to do that. In order to access slack, you need to go on the slag website, which is Slag.com Then you need to sign into your account, provided you have already one. If you don't have one yet, then you can sign up for one. And the top right, use your corporate account if your corporation already uses it. So that Slack recognizes your corporate E mail address and can assign you to the right workspace. If not, if you just want to test it out, feel free to use any of the private e mail addresses that you might have. I personally always use Google because it's the most convenient to sign in. So I'm going to sign in right now as I have already an account and I also have two workspaces already. If you have not yet a workspace, just create one. I will tell you the details of workspace later on. Just imagine you have either created one or there is already one. What can you do inside Slack? It's launching and you can of course, also open Slack in your desktop app if you want to, if you prefer that instead of an online software as a service tool, now we are in slack. I'm going to open up a new thread, a new channel. I can either now browse a new channel or create a new channel. But I want to create a new channel. I will call this just fun. It's a fun channel. Can do that. I will give a description. Fun only, we can describe it here. I don't want to make it private for now. It's just a public channels. Click on Create. I can invite people from my workspace already, but I just want to use it for my own. I skip it for now. This is where I am in my new channel. In order to send a new message, I just click here, down here in the message board. And I click or send high, obviously. Now I'm the only person in this channel. No one will respond to me, but anyone who's joining after me will see the entire history of what we wrote, of what information is in here. This is it for the first lecture. I just wanted to show you how to access slag, how to create your first channel, and how to get your first information out there. 4. Navigation and Overview: After having pressed fast forward for a little bit, where we jump directly into what is a channel and how you create your first message. You might now wonder what all the terminology is about and how you actually use leg. This is what this lecture will be about and also the consecutive lectures later on will be about. There will be detailed step by step, what the individual sections do. We will kick it off by giving a little bit of overview on how you use slag in slack. You have actually two main areas. Main area number one is where all reaction happens. Here is your messaging board where you write messages, where you reply to messages where you react to messages. On the left hand side, you have your navigation pane where you navigate through the different areas. We take it off at the top left, where you see in which workspace you're in. Workspace is the work environment enclosed space in which you work, where all your colleagues are in the highest level of. Here we see our workspace domain under which you can reach your workspace. You can invite people, you can create a channel. Channel is like a thread in which you organize your information on a topic based on a topic. You can change your preferences. You have your settings. You can here, manage your settings around the workspace. You can customize your workspace. You can add your workspace details. You have your tools in here. You can build, for example, your workflow where Slack is doing based on input perimeter, like it's an if then recipe. If you want to, based on an input parameter, something should happen. This is what you can build here. You also have an analytics page where you can optimize the way your team is using slag. Just imagine you have bought 100 seats, but there's actually just 50 seats active. Then you can decide either to reduce 50 seats, or you can think of how you can drive engagement with slag. Might it be training or might it be another company policy? This is up to you, but this is what you can use the analytics part for. You can of course, add workspaces and switch work ******. We have the option to open and download the desktop app and also to get the mobile app. You can of course, sign out from here. Below that you have different threats that you might be part of. You can be part of various channels, but under threats you will see those parts where you are actively part of. Because you were asked for something or like we were mentioned for example, you were tagged or because you wrote a message. Here you can see literally all the different parts and slag that you were part of, that you were part of. You can specifically check out your mentions and reactions. This is where you were mentioned or you wrote something and you got a reaction. This is a bit more limited to the specific messages. Whereas the thread really builds or gives you the entire history of where you were part of the. You also have your drafts, like whenever you start writing a message, it's getting saved as a draft. You have saved items. You can also save, for example, messages to your account. For example, if you want to read them later or if you want to be reminded of them later, You have Connect options. Connect is basically when you want to work with others outside of your company. Of course, you cannot demand anyone who's working with the company to create a slag account and pay for it if you're the only one. Working with Slag Connect gives you the option to build a data channel through which an external party may be a customer, a business partners, or can get access to specific communication that you involve them into. It's like a partner's account they don't have to pay for, and that you're not getting charged extra for. It's a win win situation. You do not need to change back to Outlook, for example, to communicate with those business partners. Then of course, you have your expanded menu where you can check out all the unread messages or direct messages. You can check out the channel browser where you go through all the channels available to your space. You can see the file browser where all the files are stored or where all the files are sent visible. You also have the people and user groups. Like user groups is the team organization, whereas the workspace might be, for example, the company or the organization. The user groups are, for example, you smaller team or your wider team, like, I don't know, 101520 people however, or whatever your team is about. And you can easily add these user groups to your channels instead of writing or adding each, each and every individual. You can also integrate apps to slack. You can transform information and communicate between applications. For example, Asana, Outlook.com without managing tasks twice, which is a great feature. Then obviously you have your channels. You have public channels which is marked with this hashtag. Or you have enclosed channels which are marked with this log. Just to show that this is a locked enclosed area where only maybe 231015 people are into, for example, your team, whereas the public ones are free for everyone in the workspace to join. Then you have your direct messages. The slack bot might not yet be visible to you, which is because you've not used it, but we are talking about this later. In the direct messages you can do guess what? The direct messaging between others or directly. As a first tip, I recommend to use direct messages really just very limited for unrelated work stuff like maybe not projects. Because the actual idea of slack is of course to push as much information into channels as possible so that anyone can search on it. Whenever there is something you communicate in a direct message that is relevant for all I recommend to answer in a channel. Then you can see also here the apps, where you can basically interact with other external applications. On the top, you have the search bar, which is super important because slack can help you to find stuff if you lost it or if you're searching for stuff. See your history, where you see all the areas that you have accessed in the past and what you've done. On the right hand side, in turn, you have your personal account or your profile with your status. You can set a specific status, you can pause notifications, you can go into your profile settings, you can check out your preferences and you can sign out of your workspace. This is a quick and dry overview run. In this lecture, you have learned where you can find what on a high level in slag, and we are now going to discuss the areas in detail. 5. All you need to know about Workspaces: We kick it off by detailing what a workspace is about. When you registered yourself for slack. You might wonder why you've seen this screen where it may recognizes workspace for you or it does not give you any work space. And you might ask yourself, what is even a workspace? Workspace is the work environment in which you will use Slack. Workspace can be as large or small as you would want it to be. It can be equal to the size of your company. It can be equal to the size of a sub team, a sub organization, or it can be just one team. It really depends on how large the team or the company is that you would want to display in slack. If you have, for example, a company or work in a company with 30, 40 people, you need to ask yourself, will the information that we share at scale be relevant for everyone in my workspace? Everyone in my company. The answer for 30, 40, 50 people might be yes. The company is small enough so that everyone wants to know what's going on in the company. But if the company is 5610000 people of a size, then you might want to use workspaces, multiple workspace instead, where you slice down the overall size of your company into smaller areas. Why that? Because whenever you create a new channel, new thread, you want to start a new communication. Slack will ask you whether Slack should invite, by default, all people in your workspace. Just imagine from 2000 people in your workspace, the information will only be relevant for 1,000 people. Then it might be a bit of a burden. Labor intends to manually select the 1,000 people this is relevant for. This is why it's so important to select the right size of your workspace. You can also organize your team in sub teams and user groups. We're going to go into detail more about this later on. But as far as it comes to the workspace, you really should think of how you want to work with information and what reach this information should have in your organization. How do we create a new workspace? As I mentioned, when you start off using slag, you are greeted with one of two options. Like either what you see right now where you have a work ****** and can create a new workspace. Or where there is no workspace at all at the moment and you have to create a new workspace. Let's create a new workspace together. Click Create another workspace. We need to confirm which e mail address we're going to use for that workspace. We might want to use a different one. We need to give again our approvals for Google to use all of that. Then we can create a new workspace. When clicking on Create a New workspace, I have now to inform about or name the work space. It can be either the company or the team. Really depends, but I just call it now Fun. Click on Next. Now the question is what the team, what the workspaces predominantly working for. You can define, You can give a bit of information and give again, just fun. Now I can invite other team members, but I can also skip this step. I will skip this step. There we go. We have our new workspace. What you might notice is we have here the fun workspace. Fun workspace is in enclosed area. It's not mixing up with any of the data from other workspaces I'm actually part of. It's like really an own environment. If I would want to change my workspace, then I would have to really log into my other workspace. It's not really like a different account, but it's different environment. What can I do with this workspace? Now I can click on the workspace name and the top left. And then I can go to at Work space, I can sign into another workspace. I can again create a new workspace. This is how you create a workspace from within a workspace. I can also find workspaces. If I click Find Workspace again, I should log in. Then I see what other workspaces are available to me. Hence, I could look into these workspaces as well in a separate window because it's a separate environment. But I could also switch to other workspaces by clicking on Switch workspaces, click on Switch workspaces Therewith, I change the environment to my other workspace. In this lecture, you now learned how to use workspaces, How to create a new one. You learned about what's important in determining the size of the workspace. And why it is relevant to adjust the size of your workspace. 6. What is a Channel?: In this lecture, I want to spend a little bit of time to expand on the channels which we talked about before. Channels you will find on the left hand side, channels are basically comparable to threads in. For example, read it. Whenever you have a topic you want to inform about because you're working on it, you need to give updates. Because you want to discuss something, you need feedback or whatever. You can create a channel. Channels really replace the legacy e mail functionality, like you want to reach out to bigger audience. Do not use e mails, use channels. Why? Because to channels you can invite people actively. And those who are invited can then actively search for information, which is rarely possible with e mails. Because with e mails, the information is only with those persons who have been involved in this e mail threat. And potentially you have forwarded, you have deleted stuff, no one has really the full picture. Aside from those people who were involved in the email threat the entire time, which is the biggest advantage of channels, you have basically two different types of channels. One public ones, those marked with a hash tag, and you have the locked ones, the private ones. Whereas you can always move from a public channel to private channel, you need to make sure that when you select a private channel upfront, so you create a new channel that is private, that you will be never, ever able to put that into public one. Why? Because Slack wants to guarantee a certain privacy whenever you're invited into an enclosed space, an enclosed communication, like a private channel, you need to rest assured that this information stays private. That's not out of the sudden publicly available. Just imagine you have a channel where you discuss H R stuff with, for example, your HR business partner. This information should of course, stay within the limits of this channel and should not be published anytime soon because someone comes across the idea that it might be great if everyone has access to the information. That is the warning from my end that whenever you create a new channel, just be aware of how you would want to use it. Let's now do that. Let's create a new channel. We click on the Plus next to the channels and create one here. We now have the option to either browse channels. There, we can see all the available channels. For example, if there's already a channel that we would want to join into here, you can see what channels are there, especially for the locked ones. You could just ask for permission to join, but for the public ones, you can just join. In this case, we want to create a new channel. We don't need to browse the existing ones. And we click again on the Plus, then click on Created Channel. Now we need to give it a good name, a catching name that identifies the channel. If you wonder, yes, you can only write without capital letters. All the channels are written in small letters. Let's just name it, for example, We want to call it sales, but jet. And whenever you press space, there will be a connector in the middle. Then you have the option, you don't need to. It's not mandatory to give it a fancy catchy description so that others browsing through the channels know what this channel is about. And I would highly recommend to give it a little handy description what it is about. In this case, I would say it's about the sales annual planning. This is the option then to market as private. When we market as private, as I just mentioned, just be sure that it should stay forever as private. We have no option to make it out of the sudden a public channel, but you can make a public channel at any time, a private channel that is possible. Then you might wonder what share outside test means. What this little checkbox here means. Share outside test in this case is my workspace. The way I name my workspace means basically you're making use of connect. You invite or you give the option to invite people outside of your workspace into this channel. Which does not mean that anyone has access the moment you take this. But it means any part of the channel is able to share the channel with outsiders, with people outside of your channel. And I'm just going to show you how that looks like. We click on Share Outside Test, click on Next. Now it asked me whether I would want to add all the three members of my workspace to this channel. I don't want to. But this is why I put so much emphasis on select the right size of your workspace because if your workspace has 2000 people. It really relevant for 2000 people so that you would want them to go into this channel. Or is it like this information is just for 1020 people, whatever? In this case, I want to add specific person. This specific person is outside of my company. I click Add. Now Slag recognizes that this is a different email domain than the one I was using. Slag is asking me is the person from another company or a colleague of mine? If I now click from another company and would have not selected that I want to invite others outside my workspace, then I would get an error message. So slag is protecting me from sharing this information accidentally. I click now on Next, I invite them. I'm just saying it's part of my team. I click on Finished. Now I have my new channel. What can I do in my channel? In my channel, I can click on my channel. I can rename it. I can select a topic if I want to. I can give it another description, and I see who and when was creating this channel. I could leave the channel if I want to, but then the channel is of course not closed, it's still there. I can add files, or I could see files that are in here on members. I see the amount of members that are clearly in here. I could also check out the integrations they work in. Like for example, any workflows or any applications that I'm using here. I can also, for example, send e mails to this channel. I could also send e mails to this channel that are generated as a post. We will talk about this later on. I also have the channel settings in here. I could check out the connect settings. I can check out huddle. Huddle is a form of communication. We're going to talk about this later on. We can change to private channel, we can archive the channel for everyone. That means it's becoming inactive, but it's still there. Can delete it. Deleting needs, literally it's going away. Then we can market as a favorite, if it's a channel that we are frequently using, we can market, we can enable notification. Whenever there's an update inside the channel, we get a notification or can start a call inside the channel. Going to talk about this later on as well. Then on the right hand side, of course I also see my members of this channel then, which is a very great function is you can add bookmarks to your channel. You can add, for example, very important links that are part of your team project towards. I'm just going to add Google, in this case Google.com Press Enter. You can add. There you go. You have a link inside your channel that opens up if I click on it. But I can also of course, organize by bookmarks in folders so I can make a folder structure. In this lecture, you learned about how to create a channel. What different channel types there are, what you need to watch out for if you create a channel, and how you change the channel settings and create bookmarks inside your channels. 7. How to write a Message?: In this lecture, I want to talk about how to write a message and how you can format your message. Or specifically in which different ways you can send a message inside your channel. You have the message box down here where you can write something, unlike an e mail slack is a bit more informal. You don't need to write a very, very formal address, you just get quicker to the point. And you write your stuff as usual. You write in here. And then you have tools to format your message. For example, you can write stuff Bolt, You can use italic. You can use strike through. You want to show, for example, that something was already done or is complete. You can use links. You can embed links in your message that you just tag the part of the message that you want to make a link out of it. Click on this link button, and there you post your link, for example, Google.com Save it, and there you make it a link, and you get also a little preview of what your link will show. Pressing Enter will send your message automatically. You can also switch the lines by pressing out and Enter on your keyboard. By that you just getting one line down. You also can use, for example, the order list to create items. For example, if you want to showcase what needs to be done, then you can say, for example, one, we need to create a project. Second, we need a document and whatnot. By pressing Old and Enter, you're getting into a new line and thereby a new number format starts. You can also choose to make it a bullet point list instead of numbered order list. You can also use, for example, block quotes. If you say this is a block that you're referring to, then you can use the block quotes. You also have the option to use or to embed code. If you want to showcase that specific code is defective or you're suggesting something like this, you can use it. You can also write a code block. What else can you do here? You can of course, update or upload files. You can attach files to your message. For example, if you want to send, instead of sending an e mail with the file attached to it, you can attach it from your computer or from the recent files that are already on slack with apps, you can also pull information or data from apps directly, for example, Google Drive, but we are talking about this in a separate lecture. We also have the option to record a video clip, which might be super helpful if, for example, you want to show a glitch in a user interface. Or you want to show a process that, for example, is not working, that you run into an error. In such cases, it might be an advantage to just record a clip detailing what the problem is about rather than writing out the problem. You could also record in all your clips. Just as like for example, when you communicate in what's app, you could simply make an audio clip. For example, if you're on the go, if you have your smartphone with you, you could record what needs to be done or you can share your thought process. You also have your emerges in here, which is a gimmick. However, it's a big part of slag because you can communicate with emojis in a very efficient way. For example, if you accept something or just want to share that you find something good, then you make your thumbs up. Or if you want to share, do not agree to something, you can do your thumbs down. As I said, this is a big part integral part of slag to use emojis everywhere. I'm going to talk more about this when we talk about the reactions, the region on a message. Else you can also mention someone. You can mention either a channel, you can mention a user group, or you can also mention individuals if you want, for example, an update by someone. Then you can, for example, in this case, tag a person with an ad. By doing that, the person who you will get notification that there's something to do, that there's something to react on. In this case, the select says, I mentioned a person who is not yet part of the channel and is asking me whether I want to invite them now or whether I want to do that later or whether I want to do nothing. I want to invite her just to make sure that she's part of the channel now Slack has editor to the channel, which is a great tool. Then you can also of course, your height, your formatting. If you want to have more space for writing the message, you write a message. You can either send it right away by pressing Enter, or you can click, of course, on the Send button at another option. You can also choose to send it later. For example, maybe you want to prepare something at the evening, but you don't want to push the information right now into the channel because you don't want your team to be online after hours. Then you can schedule it for tomorrow morning so that your team sees it upon start to work. This is a great function if you want to make use of it to send it to publish information later on. What else can you do with your messages? You can also add your message. If you say you have done a mistake, you can go into it, change your message, click on Safe, and thereby, for example, if you forgot something or if you made an error, you can just correct it. You see it down here with the edited symbol that this message has been modified accordingly. Apart from editing previous messages that I've sent, I can also delete my own messages if I, for example, say, okay, I sent this message by mistake to the wrong group, or the message is not relevant anymore. Instead of using email and for example, Outlook to recall a message where I, then I have to wait until I see whether my recall was successful or not successful. Creating churn with others, I can slack directly, delete my message, which is again a difference to e mails. How do I do that? I click on the three buttons and then I click on Delete Message. Need to confirm that I want to delete it and then it's gone simple and full control at your fingertips. In this lecture, you learned now how to write message, how to format messages, what features come along with the sending of messages, and how you also can edit your message later on. 8. Communicate effectively with Reactions: In this lecture, I want to show you the beauty of reacting to messages in slag. Just imagine were on vacation. You see tons of communication in your e mail box, In your legacy email inbox. You want to reply back to an e mail that was written like four or five days ago. In the meantime, the communication has evolved though, and others have answered. The topic is far more developed than what you've read four days ago. But you still want to clarify that one point. What can you do? You can reply on that. Then you're confusing everyone because you're replying to a specific point in time, whereas the communication has evolved. In the meantime, everyone is confused. What are you referring to? Have you read the other things before which just creates confusion and churn. The beauty here is in slack. Of course can always agree, disagree or you can write a reply whenever you want to. You can write a reply and press Enter. But you can also scroll back or scroll up, basically reply to specific message. And you can do that by saying, I want to reply to this thread. What Slack is then doing is Slack is creating a sub thread in this specific message without interfering with the entire message flow I can now. And you see on the right hand side, the thread is opening up. I can reply here and write something. Then you see if you scroll back up, that the message has two replies. You click on those two replies and you see them here, rather than there is a new communication going on down here where you refer back to something that has happened like four days ago, which is a great feature indeed. And also the person who wrote it then says, okay, there's a question, I can just reply to it. And if the person sees it's super important, the person can pin it basically to the thread, to the channel. Imagine this communication is now a year old and you're searching through it because it contains the information, the answer that you need. Or you have a question, you just go into here and reply to it. What else can you do if you see a message? You can reply with your quick emerges. And I just told you that emojis play a big integral part in slack because it's part of efficient communication. Just imagine you're texting back and forth in whatsapp telegram or wherever. You don't want to write that, you agree to something, you just write a thumbs up or you just write the checkmark, the complete mark. Same way you can do it here. You can, for example, write your colleague and say, is that complete the task? Instead of her answering yes complete, she could simply say it's complete by pushing the check mark. Or you can say, if you get a question, if no one wants to reply, instead of saying yes complete, you can just say looking into it. Or she can celebrate a success by saying, nicely done by these short answers. In terms of emojis, you can really upload something. You can react on this super efficiently. You can, of course, use any other reaction that you want to. Those three predefined emojis are defined by the workspace administrators. If you want to see other images here, then just reach out to your workspace administrator. But I will show you how this works also later on. What else can you do with the message? You can also share the message with others. You can, for example, give here a little intro why this message matters to others. You can then either copy link to the message. Anyone who has access to the workspace is then able to access also this message. Or you can share this message by clicking on Share. Then you pull the information or the message from, I don't know, 234 weeks back to the bottom to the current state of the conversation. You can also save a message, if that is relevant to you, you can click on Safe. By clicking on Safe, it just ends up in your saved items where you then can refer back. It's like your own curated posts that you find relevant, for example, text solution or a shortcut or whatever, or an explanation that you want to save for later. Else you can also use more actions. You can turn off notifications for reply, so then you're not disturbed by any notifications from a specific thread. You can mark something unread, which is also great, right? If you want to read it later, you just mark it read. Or you can also remind yourself on a specific topic to reply, which is also great functionality. Because how often do you, for example, mark yourself an e mail unread to work later on it? And here you can just remind yourself on this, but you can also, for example, pin a message to the channel, and by that it's getting pinned on the top here. For example, answers that helped, information that helped a lot, you get the most frequently asked questions. You can just pin them to the channel. And then persons can refer to it, they can click on it. And then they are guided through the right message down here. And they could even open up the thread if that is important to them. In the same way, you can also unpin the message from channels. By that, I showed you how you can properly react to messages, why emojis are important, how you can bookmark yourself messages, how you can create a sub thread, and how all of this saves yourself time. 9. Who needs Zoom, if you can make Calls in Slack?: In this lecture, you will learn how you can replace additional tools, for example, like Skype, Microsoft Teams, or Zoom. With Slack, you have built in team communication platform in Slack. You can take calls, you can make direct calls, you can make group calls, it can even make informal calls. This is what I want to show you in this lecture. Basically, you have two different ways to communicate with your peers in a call format. Number one is you can go to, for example, your direct messages. Or you can add a team member to, for example, start the call. Inside your direct messaging, you see in the top right, this little call icon there, you can literally call your peer. If I click on call, it opens up a new window. What you see now is that we call Max. And inside this interface, we have here the option to, for example, mute ourselves to put on video, to share our screen, to share reaction for example. We can also interact here with our Emo. We can say that we like what was said. Or we can also use the keyboard to type a message. Just type cool. You see on the right hand side, there was a chat bubble. We can either call directly, but as I said, we can also informally in form of a so called huddle. What is the huddle? Huddle in slack should replace informal conversations that you would have otherwise in the office, in the coffee kitchen. A huddle basically is a platform that you can join into. I just switch to on, I'm now in the huddle. Within the huddle, Max can join at any time without directly calling. It's not ringing. On the other hand side, seeing that there's a huddle, can just join. And we can also share our screen here. We can invite others here. We can also mute ourselves and we can leave the huddle or by shifting this to the left whenever you're on a call. Do you see that? There's like a symbol appearing right to your name. It shows you as a status that you're occupied at the moment. How can you do the same in your channels? And by that it doesn't matter whether it's a public channel or private channel. You click on the channel that you want to go into here. You also have the option to do a huddle. As a huddle, for example, if you have office hours or so for your project in particular, you have a public channel. You can offer office hours. And then you just join the huddle and you see if someone else is joining. You can ask questions super informal way to communicate. But if you want to directly call the entire project team, for example, you leave the huddle, Click on your project name and then you say you want to start a call. It's asking you whether it should start the call with all the project members. You say yes, then you join a call, just as it looks like in a direct call. But here you're just waiting for other, you're now waiting in the lobby until someone else is joining here. Obviously you have a dedicated window where you're talking into where you arrange a call in, rather than a huddle where you simply just press the availability button and then anyone can join here, it will ring for all the project participants. That's the main difference. As you can see, you basically have all the functionalities of, or your dedicated communication tools that are already built into slack. There's no need to have additional tools because you have it already in slack. In this lecture, you learn about the different call tiles you have available in slack. How you can take them, how it's going to be protocol, how you can join a huddle, and also how you can make direct calls and team calls. 10. Manage Usergroups: Within the workspace discussion, I explained or teaser that there is a way to manage your sub team. Imagine you have a workspace that is about 100, 200 members large. And you want to manage your own team, like your own department team in a sub organization below that work space. Then you can do that. How you do that, you click on More under your workspace. There you have the option of people and user groups. Then people and user groups. You see, obviously all the people that are assigned to the workspace, but you can also manage user groups. User group can be as large as you want it to be. Same as the workspace. I personally recommend you to have a user group that mix the size of your department, that you really can quickly manage your teams. And the beauty of user groups basically, is that you don't have to add every user individually to, for example, a channel that might be of interest to your entire department, But you can manage your users in the user group, and then you just need to add the user group to a channel. This has the obvious advantage of just adding one user group to a channel instead of 1020 different users. But it also has the beauty that if there is an internal change and one person is switching teams, for example, you don't need to kick this one person off all the channels that this person is part of, but you just switch the user groups switching from one department team to another department team, which is of course, less manual work. How do we create a new user group? We created a new user group at the right, in the top. And there we can give it a name. For example, I can say this is sales department. We can give it a fancy name so that anyone can potentially take us. We take ourselves, sales should be all lower case without any space, we can give it a purpose. We can say, for example, we handle all sales matters. And by that it's simply a distinction functionality. Whenever someone is browsing user groups and checking which user group might be of interest, then this purpose helps to determine, especially if you have subgroups, a person can of course be part of multiple user groups. You might also want to create project driven user groups. Then it might help to just detail in the purpose what this user group is specifically for. Then you can also determine if, for example, a specific user group should by default go into specific channels, which is also great tool. For example, if you onboard someone into the sales department, if there's a new team member, then you just add them into the user group and the person is then assigned to all the different channels that you defined here as default user channel. As a next step, I need to add team members that I want to. I want obviously myself to be part of it, but I also want to be to have Max in my team. Now I create the user group. What you can see now is on the right hand side, you see the sales department user group, where you can edit the members. You can kick them out by simply clicking on the X, or you can add new users by writing their name. You can also see what channels the user group is assigned to. You can edit the user group details if you want to change them, or you can also delete and deactivate the group in this lecture now you learned about the advantage of user groups. You learned about how to create one, how to manage, how to add user groups, and how to deactivate them. 11. Slack Connect: In this lecture, we're going to talk about connect. What is connect? Connect is the option to involve other persons outside of your workspace, outside of your company, even into slack. Just imagine you have a running business. You are dependent on your customers, you are dependent on your business partners and suppliers. You have chosen slag to be the one and the only tool to replace 99% of emails. Of course, you need some emails to just communicate with others, but how do you get the last 1% onboarded to slag? Because it's still inefficient to manage two tools. Obviously, you cannot of course, demand that your customers or your suppliers are buying themselves a license also to go on slag. Maybe they live in an entire other world environment in which they use legacy e mail or prefer legacy email. How can you bring them on board or slag without the need to use two different systems? This is where Slant comes into the game. Slant gives a channel that can be used by outsiders, as I call suppliers and customers without them needing to pay for a known license, without you need to pay for another license. It's already an included onboard feature in which you select who should have access to what. Obviously, if you onboard someone or connect, you want to avoid that they have the access to all the different channels. You don't want them to see what's going on in your channels or in your workspace. You want to make dedicated ****** available to those people. Let's explore how you do that. You click on Connect and then you're guided to either start a new channel, create a new channel, or to start a DM. This is also what you can do. You can also send direct messages to s, connect accounts. But we want to first, the channel basically is the same interface as we used to have when we created a default channel. It's everything the same like I will just type something in here. The only difference here is that I take the box of sharing outside test, and test is my workspace. In order to do that I click on Next. Then I'm asked whether I want to add all the team members of my workspace or just specific persons. Now I'm going to onboard someone outside my work environment. This E mail address, it's obviously outside of my reach of my workspace. And now I click on a here Slack already recognizes that this E mail address leaves the pattern of my E mail address domain of my company. Now I have to decide whether or not this person is from another company or one of my colleagues inside my company. In this case, I click from another company. Now it's super important that we have ticked the box or saying share outside company. Why? Because if we're not ticking that box, slack will not allow to on board someone from external parties. Just imagine a legacy channel that you want to protect from being accessed from outside there. You need to make sure whenever you create a channel that you unmark the box of sharing outside because then no one is able to on board that person from outside to your channel. That is super important that you take the box, then click on next. Now slag recognizes, okay, we need to slack connect for that. We say got it. Now we need to say what this person should be able to do. Should they only be able to post something or should they also be able to involve other persons, other people from their organization? In this case, I just want them to post something. Click on next. Now I can write an invite message. Hey, please join our message board our select channel in order to work on project ABC or to receive your customer orders or whatever. But I can also of course skip that. Now I can send the message when I want to see the status of my invite. Now an invite has gone out which the recipient needs to accept, obviously. Now I can click on Connect and check on the sent tab I send when an invite here. I can also revoke that if I just come across that I don't want them to have to be part of my select channel. Just click on Revoke and there with the invitation is expired. I can also start to direct message with someone from external, send an invite. Then again, the person needs to accept this invite for a direct message in this case. And by that, the person can communicate directly with you if you have a legacy channel and you want to add someone from your company, and the channel is already public, so that you can share the channel outside of your company. Then you click on the channel name. Click on Settings under Connect. You can then add People or share the link. The ad people is the same way as you just invite someone to a new channel. You click on Settings, and there you can add another person via a people. Or you can share the link if you want to, for example, involve someone who you send already an invite to. In this lecture, you learned about how to involve people from outside of your company, for example customers or business partners. And how to create dedicated select channels for them. How to invite them to legacy select channels. But also how to start a direct message or to revoke an invite. 12. Most effective search strategy: In this lecture, I want to talk with you about the search functionality in slack because this is one of the greatest distinctions to legacy E mail lines. Because from my experience, when I was searching for something in my email line, I was happy if the email line returned somehow related finding that had in the subject line what I was searching for. But beyond that, difficult, and this is the greatest difference, to slack slack, searching everything, searching for channel for messages, for people, for fires, for emojis even. And by that let's just try it out. And click on the search bar, which is prominently located in the top middle of our interface. If I just open it, you see already what you can look for. So as I said, you can look for the different attributes or the different categories. You can also search for recent surges. You see all the recent surges. Let's just search for something. Let's search fun. When I search fun, you see previews. You see that it can search for simply the word fun everywhere. It can search in the specific channel where there's already fun. Or it can search in the fun channel. There you see also the preview of that they found a channel court fun and also supporting material like resources as well as a fire that might contain also fun. What happens if I just press Fun and click Search? Everything? It will search literally everything. And what we can do now is we can see here the messages where fun is included. We can also see the related channel. We can slice down, we can say, okay, we want to just see results from a specific person or in a specific channel, or with a specific person, like a person was named in it or at a specific date, or we want to see anything with a specific reaction. We really have here the option to take all the filters that we need to. We can also say the message fire has a link, has an action, or the message is a D, M was safe, was pin is in a thread. By that you have really tons of possibilities to filter down. If you may not remember the exact message, but you remember some properties of the message, then you can filter down here. You can also, if you want to search for messages, for channels, for files, or for people, the same you can do with the result. You can also do it right away in the search. You can click on the filter bar there. You can also apply the exact same filters as we just showed, just one side node. Sometimes, especially if you sit in the office and you communicate with your colleagues and you want to help someone to search and find something, then you type in the same thing as your colleague might search for, but you don't see the same result. And the reason for that is because every one of you is part of different channels, is part of different direct messages, is part of different conversations because of that result. When you type in the search, even if it's the name or the very same term that you're searching for, generate individual results that you cannot compare to someone else's result. This is just important to know that, yeah, you really cannot compare that and can forward then a link to that specific message. But the result list, for example, you cannot say like for me it's the second from the top, because it will just look differently across the board. In this lecture, you now learned about the powerful function of search engine. How to filter your results, to filter your search. And how to find the right thing that you're looking for. 13. Manage Files: In this lecture, we want to talk about how you deal with attachments with files across the board in slag with a file, you can, for example, attach it to a message. How you do that? You click on the plus button. There you have the option to either upload from your computer, you can also search recent files that are already in slag, or you can attach something, for example, from a cloud. But for that, we need to add the application to slag. We will talk about that later on. Let's focus on uploading from a computer. If you click on that, the file explorer will open up and you need to select the rightful file. But you can also drag and drop your file directly into the message. As soon as you selected your file, you see that there is like a preview. It's just displayed as a file. Now I can just write down, have a look into the file, press Enter, send it. And there you see it already, giving you a preview of the file. What can you do with that? You can either download it, you can share it with others. You can also expand and open the file. In a new tab, you can see the file details. For example, if you want to, you see who added it when it was added to which thread it was added. You can save it for yourself. You can create an external link with the link. You can then forward to others who are part of this. Select. If they have no access to the channel, then they will also not have access to the document. You as a creator can also delete the file if you don't need it anymore. Over the course of time, you're getting involved into multiple channels, into thousands of messages. How do you maintain the overview of your important documents that you want to save for you? On the one hand, if there's important thread, you can of course pin it. Or you can save it for yourself. You can pin it to the channel clicking on more actions, And pin it to the channel if it's relevant for everyone. If it's just important to you, you can just save it. You can do the same just with the file. If you don't need the thread or the answer itself, then you can click on to saved items. By that you click on saved items and there you see that you saved this file to your personal items. But there's also another way to check out all the different files that you were involved in by clicking on more on the left hand side. And there you see the file browser. On the file browser, you see all the different files that you had access to in the past and you can of course, search for it. You can use slack search engine search it so that you maintain the overview on your files the same way you can also interact, for example, in direct messages, it's the same methodology. Basically, you add your file, upload it from a computer, and you can also interact with it in the same way. It's also stored then in your file browser. In this lecture, you learned about how to manage files in your overview in your file browser. You also learned about how to add files to your message, how to retrieve them, how to react on them, and also how to save them for later if you want to give it a read later on. 14. Get your personal settings right: In this lecture, we're going to talk about how to personalize the experience of slack because everyone has different preferences. Hence we need to individualize our settings. How do we do that? We click on our avatar on the top right. If we open up this, we see that I'm currently active and I can update my status. I can, for example, give an information on what I do right now. For example, say right now a meeting, it takes 1 hour or I'm working remotely or whatever these statuses are set from the administrator of the workspace. And we're going to talk about this later on when we talk about the workspace settings. Yeah, you can either choose one of these, but you can of course, also set your own status. If you select one of these, for example, in a meeting for 1 hour, it will already give you the clear after 1 hour. But you can also change that. You can say don't clear clear today or clear this week. Or select individual date in time when you should clear that or when this should be clear. You can also change the text in here. But of course, if there's a workspace setting where everyone is expected to use this setting just for consistency reasons, it makes sense to stick to that. You can also check the Pause Notifications button. If you, for example, don't want to be notified about anything during that time, select this. Otherwise, just click on Safe. What you then see is that there is an icon next to your name that says that you're currently in a meeting until a specific time. The same you see on top here. In addition to that, you can also say you're just at the moment away by that this green circle is clearing out to gray, visualizing for everyone that you're at the moment not active. Apart from that, we also have here our profile settings. In our profile settings, we can then see, for example, our name. We can also select the title. We can add our status, but we also can add our profile. Let's click on that. Here we have the option to change our name. We can also change our display name. For example, here it could be our full name. For example, Meyer called Max. Max, which is the nickname or whatever, how you want to display your name inside of slack. Then you can define what you do, like what is your job description. Maybe you can add your phone number. You can add your time zone or add your time zone. You can remove your photo and you can upload your photo. Once done, you can click on Safe, and then your profile is up to date. In addition to this, you can also click on again, your avatar and then select Preferences. In the preferences, you change all the settings surrounding just your account. So there's no impact on the workspace itself, it's just your account here. You can say, for example, whether or not you want to enable notifications. So you want to get notifications, what kind of notification, specific keywords you want to be notified. You want to set up a specific schedule when you want to receive notification is particularly important when you, for example, have an international team that works across different time zones. You, of course, don't want to get notifications during night time. If, for example, you have slack on your work phone or your private phone, then you want to turn that off. You can also change the sound and appearance. You can also select, for example, when you want to be not active, then you can also customize the sidebar. Basically, this here you can say what kind of different things you want to have shown in your side bar. Maybe the saved items are more relevant to you, then for example, the fibers. Then you can select or deselect this. You can also see or check out what conversations you want to see. Do you want to only see unread communications? All communications. You can also select how you want to, by default, get your sortation by alphabet or by priority. You can select different themes. You can select whether you want to have the dark theme, the light theme, the color theme that you want to have. In here, you can have p***ty of selection options. You can check out your settings for message and media. You can select whether you want to have a clean message theme or compact message theme like this with just the name and then the message rather than with the icon. You can select if you want to see the full name and the display name, or just the display name, or you can select the emojis that you want to use. You can also bring your e mail forwarding into slag, but we're going to talk about this at a later stage. You can also select the language in region. The language is just the display language of the context menus. It's not changing the language inside the workspace. All of this will be subject to the main workspace setting. You can also check out your keyboard layout, a bunch of accessibility tools where you can make it easier for you to consume the information based on what your preferences are. You can check out when slack should set your messages as read. You can check out the ion video settings, for example, to change by default the webcam or the microphone or the speaker. You can also check out any connected accounts. You have some privacy and visibility settings if you want to set them or to limit your visibility. You have some advanced settings which are just like search options, input options, you have also other options to set up slack in the way you need to use it. I encourage you to give it a look at it. In particular, the notifications should be set up in the right way because otherwise you're just flooded by notifications and yeah, just unnecessary thrown at you. Check that out and customize your experience. In this lecture, you learned now how to set up slack in a way that suits your preferences. How to change your profile settings. How you change your preference settings in order to customize it to your needs. 15. Productivity Hack - sync your mails!: In this lecture, I want to show your productivity, heck, how you can get your E mails from email clients directly into your slack account. It's quite unrealistic of course, that from scratch you're just switching over. You pull the platform e mails and you switch over to slag. Because you still have business partners, customers that work on your email clients and they don't want to maybe switch over to slag and not even to select connections. What do you do with them for that? There is a function in S, build in how you can forward emails to slack and add it to specific channels. And this is what I want to show you right now. We click for that on our channel name, and then we go on integrations. And there you see send e mails to this channel. You click on that, you say get me an e mail address, and then you get an e mail address to this channel. Whenever you're formatting, forwarding an e mail to this e mail address, it will be inside your channel. You can customize the e mail appearance so you can check out the default icon. You can give it emoji, or you can give it an image file. You can select the e mail name, like how it should be displayed inside of your select channel. And this is how it would look like, right? We see the icon, We see the e mail, the e mail address. Now we close it and let's have a look how it's displayed in our channel. In this case, I send a message from an email to this channel. You see there is like an e mail icon that there is an email with a test subject and a test message. This is what I wrote here and we have an attachment here. We can interact with this message. Now, we can share it internally, We can discuss it as you're used to do that. You can do the same in a direct message. You can go auto a direct message and click on the message name or to the name of the person. You can click on Integrations, and you can generate an e mail address to this direct message if you want to. Same way, you can also delete the address. If you don't need it anymore, then you close the loop, and then of course, no new message can be received. This is how it looks like. Then we have received an email. We see the icon. We see the email. We can display the email address. We see the test subject, the test message. And we see our attachment that's directly in here. We can do the very same thing with also our DMs. We can expand on the direct message name. We can click on our integrations and generate ourselves an e mail address where we can forward something to a direct message, can copy that one, close it, and send an e mail to this conversation. But if we don't need this e mail address anymore, then we can click on Delete Address. And by that we close that intake channel. By that, no E mail will be received anymore in this direct message board. Apart from a channel wise or DM wise. E mail intake also create a general email intake. Let's have a look at this one. Click on View Preferences, then on Messages and Media, scroll down to the very end. Here we have an e mail address. And either it's already activated or not, if we have no e mail address, it will look like this. We can get a forward e mail address. This is our very personal E mail address. What will happen if we send a message here? It's not directly going into a channel or a direct message. It will appear inside the S board. The Sl board will forward you the message, say, hey, we have received a new email. What do you want to do with it? And then you can decide whether you can stay with the message inside the slight board or you want to assign it to a specific channel or to a specific direct message. Using this e mail integration helps you to get rid of e mails at all. You can, for example, set up an e mail rule saying like any e mail that I received should be forwarded to slag. Then you're step by step integrating the emails into your slack. And you're not actively sending out emails anymore, you're communicating. Random slack, for example, could be a way to integrate or to drive participation on slag. In this lecture, I showed you how to integrate e mails actively and how to bring them into your channels. How to bring them in the DMs. Or how to generate a general e mail address that you can forward your messages to. 16. Account Settings: In this lecture, we want to talk about the account settings and the administration settings for the entire workspace. Where do you find them? Click on top of the right side of your Slack interface on your Profile, and then on your Profile Settings, Under your Profile Settings, and the more you see the Account Settings. If you click on the Account Settings and new tab will open, see a lot of different settings on the left hand side, depending on your status in slack, you will see some different settings or options to change your settings. What you will most likely always see are the account settings. It's affecting your personal account settings, but has no influence on the overall team experience on whenever you are the workspace administrator or the overall administrator or manager of slag accounts of the corporate accounts. Then you also have the administration tab, where you set the basic options for your team experience. It's affecting all the accounts. Scale it off by looking into your personal account settings by clicking on the Home tab. The Home tab is basically a landing page that determines to which areas you have access to. We can jump from the homepage directly into the account and profile settings that determine how you use your account. Basically, you can change your password, you can check out the two factor authentication. You can change your E mail address, your time zone, you can personalize the language. You can also sign out from all other sessions. And you can also deactivate if you want that. Some of this is redundant to the preferences that you could set up in the lecture I showed you before. But this is a central place where you manage all of this. Here you can manage all your notifications. You can check out when you want to get what kind of notification. You can check out the email preferences, the updates that you want to receive, and also the sign in notifications if that is relevant for you. You also have the profile settings here by clinging on that you're launching again your workspace. And we are there in the profile settings that I just showed you. Let's just jump back into the account settings. Apart from this, you also have the access logs there. You can check out in which location someone log into your account. You also have the option here to configure applications. There's an app marketplace that you can select from more to that at a later stage. You also have the option to check out your analytics or the analytics of the accounts that are using slack. The analytics part is quite interesting because there you literally can check and chal***ge how many of your accounts actually use slack on a frequent basis. This helps you to determine either to see whether you are using too many accounts or if you have, for example, bought too many seats. Just 50% of the seats are on a regular basis occupied. You then can decide on whether you want to decrease the amount of seats or whether you want to drive participation or engagement in slack. For example, through trainings or through office hours. If there's, for example, lack of participation. Here really can see how many seats you have, how many seats are claimed, How many are active on a weekly basis, How many active members you have in the organization. How many interactions in terms of communications, how many files are uploaded. Also interesting to see if you, for example, want to decrease the amount of data you're storing in slag. You can also see how many channels there are, how many messages there are in these channels. And potentially also, if you archive or delete channels, this is where you can see the analytics behind. You can also export this as a CSV, for example, so that you can do your metrics On top of that, you can have a look at the members that are active. You can see what account type they have, like if they have, for example, a connect account, like an invited member, or if there's a primary workspace owner. And all of this, this is what you can do in the analytics part. Now in the customized part, as long as you have the permission to do that, you can customize your workspace. That means you're changing the experience for everyone. But this is not, by default, available to everyone. You need to have the permission for it. And what you can do here, basically you can check out what the one click reaction should look like. As you might remember, you can react on every message with some predefined reactions from predefined emogies. This is a place where you can define them. You can also, for example, take your own emojis if you have developed on. You can check out your slack board, more to that at a later stage. But simply you can define where slack is going to respond for you on your behalf to others in a channel. You can define, for example, the profile settings in case you want certain fields, certain information, profile level as personal information always be updated. Then you can define that here. You can, for example, create custom fields if you want to have the birthdays, for example, updated or the Facebook pages. Or if you want to have the managers picked, then you can define that. But you can also select from existing fields. For example, if you want to have the direct reports or the address, if that is relevant, you can add it to the profile settings so that the information is always standardized and available. You can change workspace icons instead of having the T here on a specific background. You can also upload your own icon if you want to visualize the differences between different workspaces. You can set the default statuses for your profiles. You can, for example, set yourself being away on vacation or in a meeting. This is where you can set these as a default. You can also set channel prefixes. In the channel prefixes, you can organize the channels in a specific terminology in case all your sales channels should start off with saying it's sales and then the topic that you're discussing about. Then you can add this as a prefix in here. Finally, you have the option to check out about this workspace tab where you can see the subscription type, the date created. You can see who's the administrator, who is the owner. And you can see what the retention of your data is and how many exports have been done in the part. In this lecture, you learned about your personal account settings, but also about the workspace settings, how to personalize your experience. 17. Admin Settings: In this lecture, I want to guide you through the administration settings that you can set inside slag. It's another level on which you can set or adjust the options that everyone has available. Because you might not see the administration settings on the left hand side, which might be due to the fact that you don't have administrator rights. If you don't see them, don't worry. It's just a section that is relevant for administrator. What does administration mean? Because we have been talking about settings now in two other lectures, we have talked about profile settings. We have talked about account settings, we talked about workspace settings. And all of this is just another granularity level. Your profile settings are just taking care of your own profile environment. How do you want to use slack in your personal use? Then you have the account settings and the workspace settings, which are majorly determining how you can interact with specific workspace. And then you have the administration settings that are on another level that are the guard rates for all the different workspaces that are existing and connected to the slack environment. In this administration tab, you really set out the flexibility and you limit the flexibility that every user has or every workspace administrator has. For example, just to give you an idea, we have here the Settings tab. We have the permission step, we have the authentication tab. In the settings, you determine how people will interact with workspaces. For example, what are defour channels that people will be added once they join a workspace? You can change the language. You can change the look and feel of the profiles on workspace wide level. It's not determining what the specific workspace look, but what all workspaces under your account look like. Yeah, this is where you set the standard, where you set the standard on. For example, retention policies of data, of messages who can make calls, whether there should be notifications for people joining or leaving a channel. This is what you all can set in the settings. Now in the permission step, you determine who can do what. For example, you can set was able to use the tech at everyone, where literally everyone in a channel or in a space getting notified. You can limit that here. Who is able to give invitations? Who is able to join? You can define whether you want to have slack connect channels. You can change whether you want to have connect for direct messages. You can select who is able to create user groups. Basically you're setting here who is able to do what. And of course the settings that you're taking here influence the amount of options that everyone has in their account settings, as well as the workspace settings as well as their own profile settings. This is where you really standardize and where you have the option to integrate slack settings in your corporate standard. In your corporate safety layer, you can select the method of two factor authentication. You can change the session duration. You can force the password reset to someone. For example, forget their account login. You can check out the attachment settings of your account as well in here. What else can you do with administration? Of course. You can also manage your members. You can check who is part of slack, who is part of what workspace, and you can of course, withdraw access. You can check out the user groups that we have, like what user groups are existing. You can delete old user groups if they're, for example, not relevant anymore. You can check out who sends out invites. What invites are still pending? You can check out the Select Connect connection so you'll see who else, apart from all the employees in your corporation, have access to certain Select channels. You can check out the billing. You can change the plan. You can change the billing contact. You can change the billing address. You can check out the authentication methods that are currently in use, which looks back to the settings and permissions. You can see upcoming deprecation, for example, if there's any app that you cannot use anymore in the future, then it will be announced in here. You see which apps will be at risk to find yourself a workaround. You see here the transport layer security settings to integrate slag in your corporate security environment. In this lecture, you learned now the difference between administration settings, account settings, and profile settings, and you learned about what you can set as administrator inside your slag experience. 18. Connect any Cloud with Slack: After having talked for a while now on how to use Slack properly, let's now take a deeper look into productivity. How do we achieve more with less? And how do we make full use of the slack capabilities for that purpose. We are now going to talk about applications. Slack has built a way which you can combine multiple tools with each other. Which means there's no need to maintain information into databases and manually copy and pasting from one database to another one. But there are channels where you can retrieve information from or push information into other apps. One of these apps I would like to talk about now is the opportunity to make use of cloud services in combination with slag. How do we add an application in slag? We have at the bottom left tab called Applications. If you don't see it, just check out the more tab. Or scroll down to the very end where you see applications. Then we click on a Apps under Ad Applications. You're now seeing application browser under which they list you all the applications that are possible. However, we right now just see the recommended ones, but there's also an app directory if we click on that, we're just forwarded to another page where you see all the different applications that we have categorized in here as per the topic of use. What we want to do now is we want to use Cloud services. Basically, the methodology, like how you integrate the application is always the same. We will start off with Google Drive, but it would be the same as for Dropbox. As for, for example, one drive or box, whatever your preference is. If we want to add an application, we click on app. It opens up a new window, new tap, in which we see all the details surrounding this app. Here we see the description on what the app can do for us. We also see the pricing if there is a price. And there are apps that are free and their apps that cost money. We see the support languages. We see the permissions that we need to give this app. Certain apps need to have a certain permission to retrieve data, to push data into it. And we can see the security and compliance settings if that is of interest to us. Once we are okay with all of these, we click on App to slack. By clicking on Slack, we see all the permissions that we need to give this integration, this app integration. We click on Allow. Then you see that Google Drive is now ready to be used, open in slack. Now this is where we can jump back into slack. I'm clicking on slack. And there you see we have a new application. If I click on this new application that is left inside. And you see that the chat board of Google Drive has sent us various messages. We see an introduction and we also see the question, how does Google Drive work? And this is our question, right? We click on that, you again see what you can do with Google Drive. You can also check out the configuration, where you can go back to the directory where you can also choose the name. The customer is the name of your application and you see the user guide, how you're going to use that. The way you're using Google Drive is basically you can click on any channel. This also works for any direct message where you click on the message, you can click on the plus to add an attachment. There you see you can create a document with Google Drive. Let's click on this. We need to give it a title. I give it the title, for example, test. We can give a message if we want to. And then we click Create. You can see a new window pops up and we can start writing our document. As we are using Google Drive and we are using Google Docs. The document can be seen by anyone who has access to the channel at any time and can be commented by anyone. And it is getting saved instantly. So we can close it, basically. And then you see inside of our document, inside of our channel, that we have a new document in this document, we can add this document. You can open this document and we can react on this document. And persons can work on this simultaneously when you work on it. It also tells us that the document is, at the moment, not visible for everyone. So we can check out the rights to view it and to edit it when we share it. So I can now click Allow to add it. By that we made the right setting so that everyone has access to it. Of course, our document is also now in our document in our file browser. There you see new document where we can have access to it. Of course, we can also add document, for example, from Google Drive directly by clicking on the plus, and then we can search for from Google Drive. If you click on that, you see a preview of all the different files you have in your file directory in Google Drive. You can select one click, Select therewith the document is attached and we click on Enter, thereby you're posting the document again. We need to select who can have access to it. We need to decide on that in here. By that your settings are correctly adjusted. If you don't need the application anymore, you can either hide it. But if you click on this X, the application is not gone. In order to delete it, we need to click on About the Configuration, on the configuration tab. You see the removed tab. When you click on that, your application is being removed from slack. In this lecture, you learn now how to add a cloud drive to slack. How to in with it, how to install it and how to remove it. We made it at hand of the example Google Drive, but the concept is the same for Dropbox and for any other Cloud service that you might be using. 19. Manage Outlook Calendar in Slack: Another great application that is of great value is Outlook. What can you do with the Outlook application? You can, on the one hand, transfer e mails directly from Outlook to slack. That means you don't need to manually update and manually upload the e mail content, but you can send it directly from Outlook to slag. Number two is you can schedule events in slag that are then synchronized with Outlook. This is what we want to talk about. In this case, we click on Ad Applications There. You see already number one here, which is Outlook Ca***dar, and number two is slag for Outlook. Let's start off with the Outlook Ca***dar. We click on Ad. Of course, we need to add the application as usual to slag. By that, we need to give our permission. Again, we need to log into our preferred Microsoft account, the account that we, of course, want to synchronize, and then we are forwarded back to slack. As you can see, we have here our Outlook ca***dar app. And you see directly that you're getting the question whether you want to see all notifications automatically. Of course, then you have a meeting. You want to be notified. Let's click on Turn On. What can we do with Outlook now if we are in a channel, we can click on the Plus, and we can see all the Browse shortcuts. Here you can see your Outlook tab. On the Outlook Ca***dar tab, you're able to create an event. If you click on it, we can set up an event for this channel, because all the guests, which are optional, are invited from the channel already. You can give it the title and title. You can select the date when it should occur. You can select the duration, the time when it should take place. And you can give it description. You can share the meeting with any channel that you would want if we created. You see that, then there is a new ca***dar invite. It will synchronize automatically with your Outlook ca***dar, which erases the need to manage ca***dar invites twice, once in Slack and once in Outlook. What else can we do with if you click on our Outlook ca***dar, you then see also another interface on where you see all the upcoming meetings or the upcoming events. But you can, of course, also create a new event from here by clicking on Creative Event. You can also message all the attendees of a meeting, for example, if you're delayed or not. This is how you can organize your meetings inside Slack and directly synchronize them with Outlook. The other great feature that you can do with the Slack Outlook integration is to share messages from Outlook to Slack. Click on this feature, and then we need to add our function to slack. But we also need to enable slack in Outlook. Click on Get It Now. Now asking us which count we should use when you are an Outlook. Then you click on any message that you would like to forward to slack. Click on the three dots and then on Slack for Outlook there you need to establish the connection also from Outlook to slag, it's a bidirectional connection. There you see notification that you need to set up your account first. It detects already work space, but I need to sign in first, I need to accept it, then allow again the permissions. Once set up, I see no the available persons as well as the direct messages and channels that I can send this mail. I select project team, I can add a message. For example, Test can decide to send it to slack. I do, it's now sent. And if I go back to slack, you see that in the project team channel, you have a new message received from Outlook. This is great to transfer messages to an entire channel or workspace. I will show you later on another method, how you can share messages from any e mail client to your slight channels. But this is, I would say, the most convenient, fastest way to share messages. In this lecture, you now learned about how to use the Outlook function, the Outlook app for ca***dar, and for email forwarding. 20. Connect Asana and Monday.com with Slack: In this lecture, I want to share with you how you can integrate productivity apps into slack. For example, Asana, Monday.com But if you're using another project management tool or another process too, it does not really matter the way these programs, the way these applications work, are more or less always the same. In order to add such an application, we click on a apps, and then we search for Asana, click on A. And again, to slack, we need to allow and give permissions. We need to again allow also from Asana and potentially also log in if you're not yet locked in. Now you have successfully connected Asana and Slack in the same way we would do it for Monday.com We select Monday, click on Add to Slack. Need to allow permissions. Okay, once installed, we see both apps appearing here. What can we do? We can add, for example, a task directly to Azande.com in any of the channels or in the direct messaging boards, we click on the Plus and then we can click on Browse or Shortcuts. There you see you have the Asana tab where you can click on Create a Task. There you can simply add your task as you want to. You can select the task, name the assign the project that date in the description. By that, you can click on Create. You get the message that the task has been created. You can share that with your channel if you want to, so that it gets visible to everyone this task was created. Do you have the option then to select the project in which this task should go into, for example, product launch. And there you see now the information that this task was created. There you have more actions. You can change any of the parameters around it. You can manage to make every posts, either task comment of a task, or create a task in Asana out of any post, you can create a task. To do that, you need to connect your Asana account to a specific channel. You click add this app to a specific channel. Then you add your channel that you would want to appear. That then you have these options around the task. You can do the same with Money.com Let's add it to specific channel. In this case, we want to add it to the project team and click on at. What we can do here is the very same as we can do with Asana. We can create, for example, a new task directly from our shortcuts. We click on Monday.com and there we can either create a new item or can create an chem update which works the same way as Asana. By that, we can literally create tasks directly in Asana from slack or in Monday from slack. In this lecture now, you learned about how to integrate slack with Asana and Slack with Monday.com to synchronize tasks between Slack and these project management tools. 21. Create your own slackbot: In this lecture, I want to talk with you about slack bots. What is a slack bot? Just imagine you have a channel with 100 persons and you keep on receiving all over the place the same questions. Wouldn't it be great if someone else would pick up the ball and simply answer for you? This is exactly what a chat board does. A chat board gets triggered by specific words or specific order of words. Sends out a predefined answer, for example, to a question. Just imagine you have a big group, a big project going on in the project. All the participants are asking questions, for example, contact details, or they want to know specific locations on where data is stored or how they can retrieve reports. Of course, you can pinpoint everything in here or you can bookmark certain links on the top here. But it will not prevent people from asking before they read. In order to decrease the amount of manual and human interaction that you need to answer those questions, and to save yourself crazy amounts of time, you can design a slag board. How do you do that? You click on the top right of your avatar. You click on Profile, and then you navigate via the More button on your account settings. As usual, a new window opens up in there on the customized button, you can click on the Slack board. Don't worry if you cannot see the Sl board or if you cannot see the customized tab, then please contact your administrator, your count administrator. Because as I explained in the administration settings, the administrator sets the guard rails on what someone can do in slag and how you can customize your slag. It might be that they disabled your slag board and if you're really in need of, then there's no harm in simply asking whether they can enable you with the slag board. In the slag board, you can simply click on a new response. You can now say, a trigger word might be search. I'm searching for something. The reply should be Google. Now you save it. As you can see, I created another one where I asked for link. The trigger word is Link. And let's check out what it will do for us. Whenever someone asks search, then our slag board returns the reply as per Google D, which is the predefined, predefined response. As I mentioned, this is just an example, very simple example. But the opportunity that slight gives you here is of course, that you build an extensive directory of different replies and answers. The best way to tackle the best strategy to tackle this is just check out for yourself how many questions are repeatedly or you receive repeatedly. Just collect them. Check out what trigger words they have in common, these questions have in common and how you could answer this in a simple way. For example, I get it usually asked like, where is this in that data located? Where is it stored? Where can I find the internal wiki page which lock in credentials? We use this in that program. Personally, I use extensively the chat bot because it saves me so much time to automate the frequently asked questions all over the different workspaces. If you want to get rid of one of your answers you've given or designed, just click on the X. If you want to add a reply, then click here on the pencil to refine your response. When you make extensive use of the chat board, of course, then this gets quite cluttered. You can use the search feared to search for these entries that you want to change. In this lecture, you learn now what a slight board is, what it can do for you, how you change it, how you set it up, and how you delete it. 22. Create and manage Workflows: If you operate a large department or several groups, or you operate for example process or you need to collect data on a frequent basis from other peers, then it might be very daunting to follow up with each and everyone to specific time to get the data, to get these updates. Wouldn't it be great if Slack can do that for you? The great answer about this is yes, it can do stuff for you with slag workflows, which is what this lecture is about. Workflow basically does exactly what I mentioned. Imagine you run a project and you want by every morning, 10:00 A.M. you want to have an update. Then slag can remind everyone to give these updates as a stand up meeting. Off line data meeting. You can also collect information or you can trigger actions based on a button that you can create. Let's just start off by clicking on our work space, then on Tools and on the Workflow Builder in a new tab. You can now design your workflow. For example, you can just create a new one. Can give it a name. For example, stand up, click on Next. Now you need to design your trigger. What should be the trigger action that starts off your workflow? It can be either a shortcut, which means you're literally creating a button. When you click on it, something should happen. It can be someone new joints. It can be someone reacts with a specific emoji, or it can be scheduled time and date. I personally make a lot use of scheduled time and date because there I can say what the start date is, I can say what time. I can also say what the frequency is. In my case, I want to have a daily update click on next. Now you're prompted into what should happen. You can either send a message to, for example, channel or gender DM, or you can send a form. These are the two build in mechanisms that you can make use of in slack. But you can of course, also combine it with applications. There are tons of application that you can combine, for example, via Zep, an automation tool that you can connect here and that can trigger stuff based on, for example, a specific time, a specific action, or specific reply. In this case, I want a reminder to be sent out to my group. I can now select my channel, for example, I can select individual person, but I can also select a channel. This channel I say, please update your stuff by 09:00 A.M. I could also include a button. If I have a multi step process, then someone can skip this process step by clicking on the button. I don't need it for the moment. I can simply click on Safe. What will happen now is that next morning, 09:00 A.M. it will send a message to project team saying please update your stuff by 09:00 A.M. Super helpful. I could also of course, now initiate another message. Or it could initiate a form which we are going to talk about now. A form can be anything. It can be used for feedback, it can be used for also a report. Some companies you need, for example, to file a security report if there's an incident happening. Or you can file a personal injury report. Whatever you need, you can design it here. Let's imagine you want to create a personal injury report. Let's call it P, I report. Click on next. What do I want to do? I want to create it by clicking on a button. Which channel? I want to have it in one specific channel. I want to request help. I click on Next, click on a Step. Now I want to collect the form, because I want to know what help they need. Then a new form opens up, like the form builder here, I can give it the title. For example, I want to need specification. And then I can ask the question, for example, do you need a contact? And then I can say yes or no. I can save that. Then I need to click on Publish. Once it's public, I can click on the plus here, and I see my workflow. Click on Help. As you can see, then a new form opens up. I can give an answer here, click, and Submit. As you can see, my select board provides me a new input data. What can happen now is I could link that reply, for example, with a chat board. So the reply can be an input parameter for my chat board to become active, to ask follow up questions, or to do whatever I need to do. If you combine this in a good way, then you can also, for example, create this a buck reporting. Whenever you have, for example, running a pro, running a process, there's a box where they need support or assistance. Then you could create such a form, collect the information that you need. Because in the form you can also add more questions. You can also add another question, such as, for example, short answer, long answer can select a person or select a channel. Or D M that you have a question for. By that you can, in a very structured way, collect data with this data, you can then act on it. Since it's so built into your channels, these workflows do not really get lost. They are just part of your communication routine. And whoever has a question can easily file such a report in your select channel without calling, without writing another message. Just encourage you to make extensive use of the forms and the workflows. This lecture you learned about the benefits of workflows and forms, how you set them up, and how they look like in the front end. 23. Create Polls: In this lecture, I want to show you the most simple poll and feedback loop that you can potentially think of in slack. For example, you can make use of writing a message and asking for feedback. This saves to drive commitment and engagement amongst your other colleagues. But it also helps you because it's super simple. You don't need to set up a specific approval routine or a doodle request or whatever. Can simply write a question, something like, is everyone okay with the draft being presented to the managing director? Press thumbs up for yes, press thumbs down for no, we just send it. What the colleagues can do now is simply reply with their voting. So they can simply press thumbs up or they could press thumbs down. Since we have a little counter down here, you see then how many votes were given. What the majority wants to do with this little poll, we use it extensively. For example, if we plan something with the team, if we are asking the team for their opinion. If we asked whether everyone has read and understood a message, this is super easy to, as I said, drive commitment, drive engagement across the team. And to get quick feedback loop back, because all someone needs to do is to create a reaction, a quick reaction. In this lecture, we learned about how to super quickly, super easily build a poll and how to collect feedback from your colleagues. 24. Wrapup: Congratulations for concluding this course and for gaining a new skill set. In terms of slack usage, thank you very much for taking this course. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did teaching it in these lectures. In the entire course, you learn now about how to set up slack, how to use slack efficiently. And you also learned about some productivity hacks that help yourself to reclaim time. If you enjoyed this course, I would be happy if you could give me a review. If you're also a fan of lifelong learning and would like to extend or expand your knowledge on other courses, then just stay tuned until the next lecture. I want to give you a little bonus for concluding this course. I hope we see each other again in another course quite soon. Until then, I wish you the very best. Stay safe and have a great time. Cheers.