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As part of our continuing series on Integrations, for this outing we’re looking at popular cloud-based file storage provider Dropbox. Dropbox is wonderfully easy to use, a cinch to install anywhere, and lets you share files to many computers from one central location. Slack offers file upload and storage as well, but how do Dropbox and Slack work together?

Today we’ll describe how to enable the Dropbox Integration, what it means for both your Dropbox and your Slack Team, why you’d want to wire them up.

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A few weeks ago we got a fascinating email at Slack:

I’m Lauren Egts, a member of The Fighting Unicorns, an all-girls robotics team from Cleveland, Ohio. We competed at the world championships this year and we use Slack to coordinate meetings, send announcements, and figure out where that missing rookie went! Overall, Slack has been incredibly useful for my team, I’m hoping to talk to someone about sponsoring my team so that we can continue to thrive.

How could we say no?

The Fighting Unicorns (otherwise known as Team 2399) is an all-girls FIRST Robotics Competition team from Hathaway Brown School in Shaker Heights, Ohio. FIRST robotics competition (FRC) is a yearly competition where high school students across the globe build robots with the help of engineering mentors, to compete in a unique and strategic game announced by FIRST. This year’s competition was based around the “Recycle Rush” challenge and the Fighting Unicorns built their bot especially for the challenge. We’re also happy to report that Slack is now helping sponsor the team.

We caught up with high school sophomore and team member Lauren Egts and asked her a few questions about the competition, the team, and how Slack fits into all of it.

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We’re proud to announce the release of a better, faster, and all around Android-ier Slack for Android! We’ve been hard at work on this new app for many months and we’re so excited to share it with you all! The update will be rolling out throughout today and tomorrow.

What took us so long? Glad you asked. Here’s a full run-down of the magnificent changes that have gone into Slack for Android 2.0.

The first thing you’ll notice is that we’ve updated the way you find your way around:

• The left and right drawers have been dropped in favor a simpler tabbed navigation. Tabs provide quick access to all your channels, direct messages, starred items, and mentions.
  
• Know exactly where you want to go? Quickly “Jump to…” any channel, group, or direct message.
  
• Constantly switching between teams? Simply select your team from the top dropdown and off you go.
  
• A much refined notification experience, with notifications grouped by team.
  
• A shiny new button floats attractively in the bottom right corner of the channels list for quickly locating or creating channels, DMs or groups.
  
• Search functionality has been greatly improved with the ability to open search results in a new “archive viewer” so you can see the full context of a message result.

We’ve heard your feedback regarding the slowness of switching channels, switching teams, and generally navigating around the app. This is our first release to offer substantially better experience when you’re not connected — all the messages that loaded last time you were connected can be read, and you can move much faster from place to place. It’s a bit better now, but it will be even better in the future. Promise.

We’ve also taken a cue from Google’s Material Design guidelines and updated the app accordingly: New icons , some new transitions, and a generally more pleasant experience on most devices.

We’re also happy to say that full *message* _formatting_ is now supported on `Android`. In addition to this, we now respect your emoji preferences set via the web. What this actually means is… Android emoji! Give it a try! It’s swell.

edit: That was the logo for a hot minute. We changed it back. It was an experiment!

But that’s not all! We completely rewrote Slack for Android from the ground up so that we’d be able to provide more advanced Android features, quicker updates, and a greatly improved experience in the future. Since this is a fresh start, there will be some bumps along the way. We’re working on making performance on low memory devices better and optimizations around initial load time, for example. This isn’t the end. We’re just getting started.

Sincerely,
The Slack for Android Team

P.S. Like what you see here? Come work on the Android App!

IFTTT is a popular app that helps automate tasks between two services or programs, letting you trigger events either on demand or when you complete a task in apps. Slack was recently chosen as IFTTT’s Featured Channel and we thought we’d review how to use the IFTTT integration available to all Slack teams.

What can IFTTT do for my team?

IFTTT is a powerful tool for:

• Automating repetitive tasks
• Pinging you with reminders
• Sending notifications to the perfect place at the perfect time
• Updating status reports from various tools automatically

Combining all the features of IFTTT with Slack, you can build lots of simple shortcuts (called Recipes in IFTTT) that will report to Slack when things change. The best part is none of it requires any programming, just a few clicks of your mouse or finger taps on mobile. 

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While Slack already features dozens of hooks into various outside services, many teams have specific needs that could be met by other useful services out there. But if you’re not a seasoned programmer, the chasm between configuring an integration on Slack and writing custom bot code is rather vast, and a bit daunting. That’s no good.

Most custom bot tutorials are aimed squarely at people who work with code all the time, so if you don’t have developers on staff with extra time on their hands your custom needs may not be met. Until now.

David McCreath, a friendly web developer that also happens to be a Customer Service Agent at Slack has written the best introductory guide to explaining how you can build your first custom slash command that we’ve ever read. His simple bot only requires a single PHP script hosted on your own web hosting account, and allows you to check the current status of web servers by typing a couple words, which then pings outside services and reports back into Slack.

While you can run the script itself with minimal modifications, the great thing is the tutorial explains each major function step by step, hopefully giving you ideas for how you’d modify it for other services that can report information into your Slack team.

Once you’ve conquered your first bot, the possibilities are endless. There are lots of interesting ideas out there adding functionality to Slack. There are bots that report real-time vehicle locations for the trucking industry, a bot that mimics a psychiatrist loaded with hundreds of responses, a custom glossary to track your workplace jargon, air quality reports you can schedule daily posts for each office location, and yes even a bot to let you know when the office toilet is free for use. Get acquainted with the Slack API and start building your own personal robot army today.

We love podcasts. We love them a lot. Our team’s #podcast channel buzzes with recommendations and discussions, and anyone who loves the same podcasts we do might have noticed we’ve been sponsoring some recently, like 99% Invisible, StartUp and Roderick on the Line.

In fact, we love podcasts so much that we decided to make one.

The Slack Variety Pack is a mix of original stories, funny office culture sketches, and journalism focused on innovation, modern culture, and people who have found their purpose. There’s a little bit about Slack in there, but much more about things around us. It’s about work, life, and everything in-between.

We’ve teamed up with the brilliant podcasting professionals at Pacific Content, who love telling great audio stories in creative ways.

And there are many ways you can find it:

• Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, or 
  
• Follow the show on SoundCloud, where you will also find each individual story to make it easier for sharing, but you could also 
  
• Check out the series page at slack.com/varietypack, where you’ll find full details of all the stories, and a full catalogue of the episodes (though right now it’s a catalogue of one).
  
• Or subscribe straight to the rss feed (make sure to download the episode as well as the teaser!)

And you can give your feedback, ideas, or suggestions for future podcast stories on Twitter at @slackhq.

We’re very excited about this. We really, as we may have mentioned before, love podcasts.

If you’ve ever contacted Slack for support, it may have seemed as if your question was answered by just one person. Truth of the matter is, it was actually answered by every single person at Slack. Or kind of, anyway.

The Customer Experience team’s goal is the best possible experience from start to finish. Every reply we send is an opportunity to connect with a person. And while that sounds simple, it takes a lot of work to deliver. We wanted to offer a peek into our Customer Experience team and how we do support at Slack, with Slack.

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As a workplace communication platform, we are frequently asked about legal and government requests for user data. People are especially interested in our process for evaluating these requests and how we comply with them.

To answer these questions and to provide some clarity about our thinking, today we are publishing our first Transparency Report and posting our User Data Request Policy.

Working on privacy here at Slack, the most common question I get is, how many law enforcement requests for data have you gotten? I’ll save you a click by copying our entire Transparency Report here:

As of April 30, 2015, Slack has received the following legal requests:

• Government requests for user data: 0
  
• Other legal requests for user data: 0
  
• Content take-down requests: 0
  

Hard as it is to believe, to date Slack has not received a single request for user data or a single content removal request. At our rate of growth, we know this won’t be the case forever or even for very much longer. Having the unusual benefit of no user data requests to process, we’ve been able to step back and think carefully and thoughtfully about what we want our approach to be when that day comes. That thinking is reflected in our policy.

The second  most commonly asked question I get about user data requests is — will you tell me if you get a legal request for data about me or my team? You’ll find that answer in our User Data Request Policy above but I’ll save you another click. Our position is simple: if we get a legal request for user data, we will provide notice in advance to affected parties, teams, or individual users, unless we are legally prohibited from doing so or unless some circumstance exists that prevents us from doing so. This includes situations when disclosure could cause harm to specific people or jeopardize the security of our network.

Our goal is to put teams and users in control of their data and their privacy. To do that, we try to be transparent about our practices and our approach. Transparency is a key value for us and an important feature in Slack itself. It’s this commitment to transparency that brings me to my last point —  Slack opposes government-mandated “back-doors” of any kind but particularly a government-mandated requirement that would compromise data security.

It might seem an odd thing to even have to say that, but it is important that every dissenting voice speaks out: together, we have a much better chance of influencing the outcome. We are not the first company to venture into the debate about privacy and liberty. We will not be the last. But to the extent that anyone wonders where we stand, we want there to be no doubt where that is.

Anne Toth
VP - People, Policy & Compliance

When parents of children suffering from muscle diseases contact Dr. Daniel MacArthur’s lab, it’s often after they’ve exhausted their options. The MacArthur Lab specializes in identifying neuromuscular diseases by looking at long strands of genetic sequences using software they’ve written and open-sourced.

A few weeks ago, Dr. MacArthur tweeted this:

But what does that actually mean? We asked the good doctor to explain it to us. Slowly.

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The newest, smallest member of the Slack family has arrived: Slack for Apple Watch. No longer will you be left tapping your wrist in vain: now doing so will enable you to quickly and easily create, receive and reply to new direct messages. You can also keep track of unread mentions, and get a simple heads-up of how many team members are online, straight from your Apple Watch.

The app contains all the functionality you might reasonably expect from a tiny slab of extremely dense technology attached to your wrist — and more. With Slack for Apple Watch (and an Apple Watch), you’ll be able to:    

• See any push notifications that would usually be sent to your phone — on your wrist.
  
• Receive and respond to DMs with standard emoji, pithy pre-defined text, or Siri dictation.
  
• Create new DMs.
  
• Get a list of unread mentions of your name or highlight words.
  
• Reply to unread mentions via DM.
  
• Continue your conversation in the Slack iOS app via Handoff (when viewing a DM, even on another team, on the Watch you can swipe up on the Slack icon in the bottom left corner of your phone’s lock screen and you’ll be viewing that DM on your phone. Truly, we live in the future.)
  
• Switch between all teams authenticated to your Apple Watch.
  

If you can’t wait for delivery of your new Apple Watch, or you haven’t ordered one, you can always strap your existing phone to your wrist. Caveat: this may provide even more functionality (everything you’ve come to expect from the iOS app, in fact) but will impress fewer people.

For those who have an Apple Watch on the way, or who don’t, but are intrigued as to how Slack would work on this new piece of hardware… a small taster: