TSG is excited to announce a new Slack integration for the OpenContent Management Suite (OCMS). This post will overview the new functionality this provides an organization, as well as our thoughts on future features that could be added with Slack and other messaging platforms.

The Rise of Messaging Platforms

In the last 30 years, organizations have increasingly relied upon email for internal and external communication.  However, with the proliferation of email, a problem has cropped up – overflowing inboxes.  Many of our clients receive hundreds of emails a day, each one adding to communication noise.  It’s also common for clients to receive many emails per day marked URGENT, when in fact only a few may actually be truly urgent.  In the past 5 years or so, messaging platforms have become increasingly popular to improve communication within the workplace.  These platforms not only better organize chat-style communication, but also seamlessly integrate file sharing, audio/video calling, as well as screen sharing.

Slack is one of these cloud-based instant messaging platforms, facilitating direct and channel communications within a modern, intuitive user interface available on the web, desktop, and mobile. Slack’s powerful integration framework has driven support for applications such as Salesforce, Drive, Box, GitHub, Trello, and many more. Content from these external applications joins the Slack information stream, where users can see and take action, often without ever leaving the Slack UI.

ECM Notifications – Traditional Reliance on Email

Traditionally when a workflow task is assigned to a user, the user is notified via email in addition to the task appearing in an in-application inbox. Optionally, a reminder schedule can be set up to periodically re-send email notifications for outstanding tasks generating further task reminder emails. The notification email typically contains details on the task to be performed and a link to the task in the ECM system.

Given that users are already inundated with noise in their email, many organizations have turned to modern messaging platforms to streamline team communication.  While email notifications are still supported, the OCMS Slack integration can be utilized to send task notification alerts straight to the user in Slack rather than relying only on emails that could get lost.

OCMS Slack Integration

TSG is committed to merging the information-sharing power of Slack with our ECM solutions, starting with workflow task notifications. When an OCMS user is assigned a workflow task, he or she receives a direct Slack notification from OCMS detailing the action required. The notification provides a link to the relevant content in OCMS, so the user can easily navigate to and complete the task.

See the video below demonstrating Slack notifications for OCMS tasks:

TSG continues to look for ways to leverage Slack in order to streamline OCMS sharing and communication.  Potential future additions include:

• Channel archival – We talked to a client recently that creates and archives channels in slack for specific projects.  Once a project is finished it is archived.  A future integration could include migrating all or part of the archived channel (ex: chat, shared files, etc.) to the ECM repository before archiving the channel in slack.
• Posting OCMS content to Slack – While looking at a piece of content, the user could choose to post the document or link to the document to a Slack channel from within the OCMS application.
• Post Slack content to OCMS – Directly from slack, post a shared file to the ECM repository.  Depending on the setup, this likely could integrate with our Capture 2.0 solution to properly index the document in the ECM repository.
• Search the ECM Repository from Slack – Easily search your ECM repository via a Slack command.  For example: /ocms search Claim 123456

Let us know your thoughts below.  If your organization does not use Slack, TSG is currently working on similar integrations with Microsoft Teams, a collaboration hub in Office 365. Stay tuned for updates.