Slack Admin 101: 5 Simple (Yet Essential) Tasks Every Slack Team Owner Should Know

Slack has exploded onto the enterprise scene. To label it a chat tool is foolish. As Slack customers, we understand the power and potential it presents. But make no mistake: Like any enterprise platform, Slack poses a potential administrative, management, and security challenge for IT.

The beauty of Slack is that it’s a blank canvas. Organizations that understand this quickly become Slack power users. Across every department, core business applications are integrated and pass vital information to those that need it. It’s a better way of working.

Yet IT admins working for companies that use Slack (or those that are thinking about rolling it out) must understand that Slack requires significant IT administration, especially if it’s housing sensitive company data.

If you’d like to talk with other IT professionals about how they’re using and managing Slack, join our free IT-focused community, BetterIT.

Below are five Slack admin how-to videos that explain basic (but essential) administrative tasks.

How to Create a Standard Naming Convention for Your Slack Users

Although aliases and nicknames can be fun, for enterprises, Slack is a professional tool and it’s a best practice to create a standard naming convention for users. A standardized naming convention makes management simpler and removes any uncertainty around usernames when onboarding new employees.

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How to Disable Slack Channel Creation (Public or Private) for End Users

Slack makes communication more efficient and productive. However, when your team starts creating too many channels, it can create confusion and too much noise. At BetterCloud, channel creation is handled by our IT team and requests for new channels are handled like any other IT helpdesk request.

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How to Create Custom Slackbot Responses in Slack

You’re probably familiar with Slackbot if you’ve used Slack before. It’s the automated member of your Slack team that tells you things like when a message is undeliverable or sends you reminders. But did you know that you can program the Slackbot to respond to any command you want? As an IT professional, if you get creative with it, this feature is a limitless asset. At BetterCloud, we use Slackbot to enable our company glossary.

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How to Create a New Slack Channel

A Slack channel is an area within your Slack team that’s focused on a single topic like #technology or #security. Channels ensure all Slack conversations remain focused and help users direct their conversations into the appropriate avenues. Deciding on a topic is the hard part. Creating a new channel in Slack is easy.

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How to Set Default Slack Channels for Your Team

Although team members should be free to join whichever Slack channels are appropriate for their role and interests, it’s a good idea to set a few defaults. Default Slack channels are channels that every team member is automatically a member of as soon as they create an account.

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BetterCloud integrates with Slack (along with G Suite, Dropbox, and Zendesk) to put IT professionals in a better position to manage and orchestrate Slack administration (not to mention operational reporting and alerting). For many organizations, Slack integrates with numerous applications and spans all departments, making onboarding and offboarding tedious and complex–as well as a potential security risk. Request a demo of BetterCloud to learn how we make Slack Team management easier for IT professionals like you.