Slack has transformed business communication. It’s the leading channel-based messaging platform, used by millions to align their teams, unify their systems, and drive their businesses forward. Only Slack offers a secure, enterprise-grade environment that can scale with the largest companies in the world. It is a new layer of the business technology stack where people can work together more effectively, connect all their other software tools and services, and find the information they need to do their best work. Slack is where work happens.

Authenticating

Slack uses OAuth, a developer-friendly delegated access protocol. Quolum has already connected the necessary wires with Slack. Using a sequence of click-throughs, your organization's administrator allows Quolum to make API calls to Slack without getting access to passwords.

Step 1: Initiate a connection to Slack

Click the Connect button from the Connections card. If you are not an admin, you can invite your organization's Slack admin to make a connection to your Slack organization account. When you click on the Connect button, the web browser will navigate to the Slack login page.

Step 2: Log in to Slack

Log in to Slack using your organization's credentials. The exact login mechanism may depend on your Slack plan, and the sign-in mechanism used. You may have corporate SSO such as Azure AD, GSuite, or Okta along with multi-factor authentication. Once you have successfully logged-in, Slack is going to ask you to grant access to Quolum.

Step 3: Provide consent to Quolum

The next screen after login into Slack is the consent screen. On this screen, Slack confirms whether you authorize Quolum to access your organization's data.

Step 4: Back to Quolum

Once you have granted access to Quolum on Slack's website, Slack is going to send you back to Quolum's page in Step 1, where you started. The Connect button on the Connections card would now say Reconnect. Reconnect is used to reauthenticate under circumstances where the access has expired.

Under the hood

Using the OAuth protocol, Quolum now has delegated access to your Slack Workspace. The Quolum server, running on Amazon AWS VPC, will be able to make API calls and retrieve feature-level utilization of projects, stories, and tasks. Later, this data is crunched and available for visualization on the Quolum dashboard.