Slack previously announced major new features centred around people and asynchronous ways of communication. Today, it was the platform’s turn with Slack announcing a new Slack platform rebuild from the ground-up to give all Slack users - developers, everyday business users, even families - more power to customise their Slack experience. Slack’s goal is to give more advanced automation power to everyone using Slack.

For developers, the re-engineered platform provides a new way to create workflow building blocks that can be remixed, shared, and reused.

Ilan Frank, vice president of product, Slack, spoke with iTWire and explained, "we re-architected the entire Slack platform over the last year to have much more modular components - what we call workflow blocks - which can be re-used so developers can empower non-developers to get their work done in a faster and automated way.”

These blocks can be assembled to create powerful workflows and will contain conditional operators like if-then-else, along with integrations with a potentially endless number of other blocks.

Additionally, for the first time ever, Slack will allow developers to host apps on Slack itself in a secure, compliant environment, instead of having to find their own application hosts.

Both of these announcements can cut the development time of Slack applications from weeks to minutes.

Developers can also use application metadata to create remixed apps that communicate more intelligently with each other for increasingly advanced automation workflows. For example, a ServiceNow alert might arise and while the message is human-readable, the metadata will contain incident details that allow an automation to do something like creating an incident channel in Slack and auto-invite everyone on-duty in the PagerDuty app, and perhaps use a Jira block to write tickets.

For another example, Frank suggests you may have a logistics company and need to process returns to Amazon or to HelloFresh. By including metadata in application messages - an OrderID, perhaps - you can easily have an application of your own listening out for these messages and handle them in a controlled and planned manner.

The new platform functionality for developers is available in private beta program as of now.

However, that's not all; non-technical users can create their own custom low-code solutions without the need for IT support or software development skills. Users can grab the application and workflow building blocks from the Slack solution gallery - or create their own - and piece them together via drag-and-drop.

For example, a sales representative might create a workflow that triggers when a Salesforce opportunity comes in that meets a predetermined threshold in a specific region. The workflow will create a Slack channel with a local reseller partner to coordinate on the deal. This can be achieved by simply dragging a Salesforce notification block to be connected to a Slack Connect channel block, and so on. Making Slack automation has never been so easy.

This new block-based platform "gets building closer to the end-user," Frank said. “Previously you had to write a full application with slash commands, make visualisations, and the one developer had to do everything while non-developers simply used it.”

"We want to get even closer to the end-user," Frank said, "so if they run one of these workflows - say, PagerDuty to Jira - but want it to direct message them instead of creating a ticket, they can borrow from that workflow and make it run differently, all without needing to be a developer.

Even better, you can easily create your own shareable libraries, allowing you to publish all the functions you’ve pieced together and/or modified, Ilan explained.

The functionality will be available in Slack next year.

Additionally, Slack Connect has been super-enhanced to support up to 250 organisations in one channel - up from the current limit of 20 organisations and this will be released to the public early next year.

Later in 2022, companies will be able to set up secure work environments for large, complex environments - the Olympics, say - with thousands of people from thousands of companies all working together right in Slack.

This is a big deal; 77% of the Fortune 100 use SlackConnect, Frank said. To pull this change off required a re-architecture of how SlackConnect works, in order to scale it up to this size. Slack says it will be available to everyone early next year.

Now, free customers need not fret; apart from the application hosting, all the items listed above shall all be included with the free edition of Slack. It remains limited to only 10 applications, however.

"As developers modify their applications to use the new platform they will have to use blocks,” Frank said. Old applications won’t necessarily be pushed off the store, and nor will existing apps break, but developers will, at a set date, only be able to publish workflow block style applications.

It's an exciting future for Slack users, with the power for everyday folk to create integrations as long as they can imagine them, and the building blocks are available.

See the workflow and metadata features in action here: