Slack announced today new tools for admins of larger organizations, designed to help keep an uncluttered workspace chatter and automate workflows in larger organizations. The new improvements also apply to smaller enterprises as well.
To maintain a less noisy group conversation, Slack has introduced the Announcement channels, where admins can limit who can make posts and who can respond. Previously, this capability was available only in the general channel. With today's announcement, admins of teams on the Plus or Enterprise Grid plans can control who can post in any channel.
In addition, Slack has also announced new APIs meant to help admins set up templated workspaces and automate the approval of app requests in any workspace of an organization. The automated workspace set up will be done based on information gathered through web forms. Slack is also planning to roll out new capabilities in the future that will let admins build workspaces with automated settings, content, and apps. Additionally, the ability to manage app approvals across workspaces using a set criteria is available only to Enterprise Grid admins.
Admins can also use the APIs to add members to certain workspaces and delegate their admin permissions without actually having to join those workspaces. Additionally, guests can be added to certain channels and admins can set their expiration date.