Slack and Webex Integration – Connect Slack and Webex
Connecting Slack and Cisco Webex needs to be native, seamless, and simple to administer.
Standalone, both these apps have achieved this messaging nirvana.
To go one step further and connect these apps to work across platform, there are several ways to achieve this. Some better than others.
Mio - Chat better, together. Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Cisco Webex Teams. Send cross-platform messages to colleagues and clients on Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Webex Teams. Enable cross-team collaboration between employees who use different chat apps. Chat with external business contacts without managing multiple accounts. Your administrator can also enable you to schedule Webex meetings directly in Slack and view a list of upcoming Webex meetings. From your meetings list, you can join meetings that you're invited to, or you can start or cancel meetings that you've scheduled. Webex (formerly Webex Teams) 9.9. Based on 50 answers. Is very easy to use and it has an intuitive interface. Also you can connect from windows PC or a MAC without problem or from an Andoid Cell phone or iPhone in the result is the same, you will have the. Cisco Webex Meetings の会議やパーソナルルームを Slack から開始および参加できます。.
We often hear from customers trying to connect Slack and Cisco Webex to get the most out of each solution.
However, this often results in another chat app being introduced and limited or loss of functionality.
We’ve highlighted 4 ways to connect Slack and Webex then gone out and found a better one for internal and a better one for external.
You may also like: Ultimate Guide to External Federation between Slackand Webex Cisco Webex
1- Connect Slack and Cisco Webex via workflows
Pros:
a. Workflow apps allow IT admins to quickly connect Cisco Webex and Slack. Generally, workflows only take a matter of minutes to set up. If you want to set up a one-off integration or trigger from one platform to the other, this is the ideal solution.
b. Most workflow engines come with intuitive interfaces so no back end coding is required to configure
Cons:
a. Integrations need to be set up one by one and are time-consuming if you need to connect entire organizations.
b.When triggers and actions need to be modified, integrations must be modified one by one.
c. Workflow software is limited by number of integrations.
d. Workflow triggers sometimes only work one way. Communications in Slack could make it to Cisco Webex but not vice versa.
2- Configure webhooks for Slack & Cisco Webex
Pros:
a. Webhooks are a simple and cost-effective method of joining Slack and Webex together for certain events. If the scenario resides in a single channel, webhooks provide a good solution to connecting Slack and Webex..
b. The Slack API enables you to “make it fancy” with advanced formatting. Interactive buttons and menus are available when using configuring webhooks in Slack.
Cons:
a. Webhooks require lots of manual configuration. If you have multiple Slack channels or Webex spaces, this means configuring on a one-by-one basis.
b. Events triggered by webhooks in Cisco Webex are only near real-time. Whilst both Slack and Webex are persistent chat tools, the instant messaging experience is no longer instant in only “near real-time”.
News also broke in April 2020 when it was discovered some Slack webhooks has been exposed as potential phishing hooks.
Researchers said there are nearly 131,000 Slack webhook URLs available on the Internet.
3- Connect Slack and Cisco Webex using tubes
Pros:
a. Tubes provide a two-way, real-time collaboration between Slack and Cisco Webex.
Cons:
a. In 2017, Slack introduced Shared Channels which provides the functionality that tubes were set out to do. Essentially, this is providing a federation solution so that two different companies using Slack can communicate on the same platform.
b. The company behind these tubes was acquired in 2017 and has been off the radar since.
c. Like webhooks, tubes require lots of manual configuration. If you have multiple Slack channels or Webex spaces, this means configuring on a one-by-one basis. You probably need a full -team sync that will add any new channels created in the future automatically to the other side too, so you don’t have to keep setting up more tubes
d. Tubes are considerably more expensive than any of the other methods mentioned in this post i.e. webhooks, workflows and even the solution below.
4- How do I use Webex in Slack?
The Cisco team knows you use several apps every day.
This is why Webex technology is adapting to work better with other tools.
Cisco even produced a video on how teams can combine Slack and Webex:
How do I use Webex in Slack (internal):
If you’re an internal colleague, you can use the Cisco Webex Meetings and Slack integration. This app lets you schedule and join Cisco Webex Personal room meetings. You can also launch scheduled meetings within Slack.
To start, you’ll need an admin to install the Webex Meetings integration for Slack.
Search for Webex Meetings in the Slack app directory to install the app.
After installation, clicking the call button in Slack will launch a Webex meeting. You can also see a list of upcoming Webex meetings in the Meetings list.
Internal users can use shortcuts in Slack like /WebexSchedule List today to see upcoming meetings.
Real-time notifications display when a meeting is about to begin.
The Cisco Webex Meetings app doesn’t support users outside of your business.
How do I use Webex in Slack (external)
Using Webex in Slack with external team members is more complicated.
One option is to set up a Slack shared channel.
Shared channels let two companies or organizations work together in Slack. Shared channel members can use apps and integrations to start calls.
If you andyour external user have the Webex Meetings integration, you can use it for calls. This only works for Cisco Webex Meetings, not Webex.
To set up your shared channel:
- Click the + icon next to Channels
- Create a channel
- Add a name and description
- Tick the box for Share Outside (name)
- Enter the email address you want to send the invite to
- Click Finished
Invitation links to shared channels expire in 7 days.
Slack Vs Webex Teams
There’s no way to combine Webex with Slack using native integrations.
To message external contacts, you need a third-party solution. Mio syncs Slack and Webex.
With Mio, you stay in Slack, and your colleagues stay in Webex. Mio syncs the messages across both platforms. More on these below!
5 – The better solution for external comms?
Federation for Slack and Cisco Webex
Do you communicate with people outside your organization?
Do they use Slack when you use Webex?
Maybe it’s vice versa.
When this is the case, it becomes extremely unproductive moving out of your preferred app, into your external contact’s choice of app, and starting the conversation again.
Or even worse, end up resorting to email like it’s the 90s. (Okay, email has a purpose but you get the point).
That’s why Mio has created universal channels for Slack and Webex…
You can stay in Slack and send messages to your contractors, suppliers, or clients that use Webex (or vice versa).
They stay in their platform too and Mio translates the messages across platform.
And it’s not just messages that are supported! GIFs, emojis, channels, DMs, and message edits/deletes are all supported.
If this sounds like something you need, install Mio into your Slack workspace or Webex space.
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The rapid switch to working from home has led to a surge in the use of digital teamwork tools in the enterprise. One standout story highlighted by messaging platform Slack is global investment firm Man Group, which rolled out Slack to help its 1,400-strong global workforce move to remote working in just two weeks in March. This is a 200-year-old company — it served its first clients in 1783 — in a highly regulated industry that is hyper-conscious of compliance and security. Its story holds valuable lessons for other established businesses with similar concerns as they move to more distributed patterns of work.
Man Group has since published its own account of the move to remote working, which emphasizes how well prepared the group already was for supporting remote access, using Citrix and Cisco VPN technology. Nevertheless, moving to full remote working required a slew of new tools. Alongside Slack, the team also fast-tracked the roll-out of Cisco Webex, Jabber and Adobe Sign, and implemented Teamviewer for remote support.
In two weeks in the second half of March, the number of Slack users soared from just under 600 users in the technology teams to more than 1200 across all functions of the business. By mid-May, more than 984 public Slack channels had been created within the company and almost 1,000 Webex meetings now take place daily.
Webex Participant List
I had the opportunity to drill down behind the published Slack case study by putting some further questions to Tom Price, CTO, Core Technology at Man Group, via email. The original plan was to wrap this all up into a conventional story, but his answers were so thoughtful and thorough, I decided to let them speak for themselves. You can read them, unedited, below.
The rapid switch to remote working
- Technology: Was everything already cloud-based or were there some other challenges in equipping people for remote working?
- People: Were people already working from home either occasionally or frequently?
All of our staff already had remote access, and it was something everyone had to use once a month or they'd get chased, but a lot of people hadn't performed all aspects of their work from home. Some would only use it during evenings or weekends, some would use their days working from home to catch up on reading or writing documents. The difference this time was that people would need to work from home for a prolonged period of time, so they had to be able to do everything.
We conducted two ‘Working From Home' tests in the weeks leading up to lockdown where we told people in critical roles to stay out of the office for 3 consecutive days. That helped people perform a more comprehensive test and to identify what they needed to be able to work productively from home, not just to get by. We allowed staff to purchase monitors, webcams and headsets so that people weren't trying to work off 13-inch laptop screens, instead they had similar tools to those they used in the office.
We are migrating more and more commodity services to the cloud but the bulk of our applications are internally developed and hosted in our own data centres. That meant we were dependent on traditional VPN and desktop virtualisation tools to enable our staff to connect back to services. Both of those platforms have performed well but as more applications move to the cloud we will be overhauling our external network connectivity to better support a hybrid infrastructure.
Change management
- Presumably the training emphasized some key guidelines that were important for people to follow — can you give some examples of some of the most important/novel habits that you wanted people to adopt?
We rolled out a number of new tools, including Slack, the day before the UK Government asked business to work from home. The team had planned a series of in-person training sessions at our London offices and overnight they had to pivot to performing them online. In that first week we had over 200 people attend the remote sessions.
For Slack we wanted to encourage the use of public channels by default rather than private channels. There are always internal, private discussions that shouldn't be visible to all, but the value of a collaboration platform is that it breaks down barriers and allows people to find information. If all discussions are in private channels it prevents that. We also wanted to retain the informality of Slack, compared to the formality of email. Slack had been in use by the technology team for almost a year and we did not want it to turn into a centrally managed, locked down communication platform and lose a lot of the value.
We also wanted to encourage people to use video on our conferencing systems. We were replacing an existing telephone conferencing platform with Webex and we wanted to make the transition to people using it for video rather than just dialling in from a phone. Being able to see our colleagues and clients has been really important through the lockdown period.
Security and compliance
- Were there any factors to consider when connecting Slack into your identity and access management infrastructure?
The mobile functionality was a big part of the benefit of Slack compared to our previous internal 1:1 instant messaging apps. That said, we have strict rules regarding access to our systems from outside of the corporate network to limit data loss risks. We use a mobile device management platform that supports both corporate devices and personal ‘Bring your own devices'. For enterprise customers, Slack provides a special version of their mobile app under their enterprise mobility management (EMM) program that prevents users accessing Slack using the normal app. We can then use the MDM platform to ensure devices meet our required security configuration before we deploy the EMM version of the app — we essentially control the keys to accessing our Slack.
- Were there other notable elements that were crucial to get right from a security, compliance or data privacy point of view?
Man Group is a regulated entity and we therefore we need to ensure that we are able to effectively and efficiently monitor any communications platforms. Slack's support for this was surprisingly mature and it was a relatively easy process to onboard them into our existing compliance monitoring tools.
Workflow automation and integrations
- Please give one or two examples of workflows that you've built or brought into use, and how they've proven useful
In Man Solutions, we've built a number of integrations with our quant research platform as well as some other data sources. They help with automating the production of fund performance reports, which used to be emailed. Using Slack helps to generate conversations around the content of the reports, and the asynchronous nature of the discussion also helps with the geographically dispersed investment team. The bots can also be used to ask questions regarding specific equity exposure or to search external sources for share price news, all from a single command interface.
On the technology side, we've also built a number of integrations with our virtualised technology environment and with our IT service management tool. In certain Infrastructure channels we have bots that reply to mentions of server names with links to the virtualisation management and monitoring page for that server. We also have bots that help with the change management process raising changes, chasing approvers and updating channels as the change is implemented.
- As people adapt to remote working, do you expect to use more workflow automation? If so, please include one or two examples and how they'll help
We believe Slack can be transformational when it comes to process automation, whether that's because people are working from home or just in different offices or countries. We are keen to explore how it can support the investment and supporting operations processes which span multiple teams and departments. We also plan to review all workflows that are currently generating automated emails and consider moving them to Slack. Putting all that information in a single channel — and providing the ability for all teams to be informed of related discussions — highlights the benefits of persistent chat over email.
- Integration to Webex is an obvious one as an ability to switch into face-to-face conversation is super important when remote working. Are you looking at or already using integrations to streamline business processes? Again, examples would be great.
The Slack integration with Webex has been great for escalating a discussion that starts in Slack into a video conference. Slack also has some impressive integrations with cloud-based tools that we're already using across the organisation. Some of our more generic business processes are already well supported by existing solutions.
Wellbeing and culture
- Has Slack been instrumental at all in maintaining wellbeing among staff who may be isolated or facing other challenges at home?
Very much so. I talked earlier about a desire to maintain the informality of Slack and we've seen that in a number of our channels over the last couple of months. Our charity #mankind channel has most of the company in it as people challenged their colleagues to post pictures of meals they'd cooked in quarantine with an accompanying donation to local food banks. These non-work channels have helped maintain relationships and wellbeing as a reasonable replacement to catching up over lunch or while making a cup of tea.
- Is there any evidence of people working less in silos and doing more knowledge sharing (while respecting compliance constraints of course) as a result of so much communication now being in Slack?
A great example during lockdown was in our tech support channel where we saw a flood of queries in the first few days as people were working from home. When our support engineers were busy, other people would step in with help — saying how they'd seen that issue too and how they fixed it.
The new normal
Slack Webex Personal Room
- Will the current phase of remote working lead to more permanent changes to how Man Group operates — for example will everyone ever go back to the office in the same way as before?
Slack Webex Status
The workplace will definitely change and the role and size of central offices will diminish. I think it's too early to predict that companies will commit to fully remote working but we've certainly seen an increase in staff saying they'd like to work from home more than they did. Across the firm, we have always encouraged flexible and remote working where possible, with many departments having staff who worked remotely 1-2 days a week, and I expect that to increase across our departments along with the number of days people are working from outside the office.
Slack Webex Teams
A lot of technology solutions that support remote or flexible working also support our global workforce that is already not all in one location. For a company like Man Group, with offices in London, the US, and Asia Pacific, investment in new collaboration tools will support and benefit both outcomes.