n8n at Scale - Episode 1: Unlocking Slack's Potential with n8n Automation

hello everyone Welcome to our first episode of nadn at scale my name is Angel and the goal of this webinar series is to help itops and Enterprise users get the most out of nad's automation platform by integrating with Enterprise level software and showing you tips and tricks on how to make that process smoother and more sustainable over time so now to stay up to date with the latest episode of nadn at scale let's make our way to our website here on the homepage if you scroll down to the bottom you'll see our events uh button right here just click on that and that'll take you to our community Hub you can subscribe to updates anytime there's any kind of events or nadn at scale uh webinars coming up we'll be uh posting them here for easy availability now without further Ado let's dive into it once again my name is Angel a little bit about myself I've been working with it in cyber security for the past 5 years and in web design for over 15 years running my own web development firm and really trying to make the whole process of Automation and interaction between users and the back end as simple and smooth as possible my goal has always been to reduce user actions down to one click if possible or as few clicks as possible and I've taken that approach to my software engineering background and it's been very successful and at these companies that I've worked at threat connect blackcloak even paloalto I've been a big evangelist of nadn because it's such a simple platform to utilize and it not only allows you to visualize the things that you're trying to build but it lets you quickly iterate on your ideas so you can have an idea you can quickly connect to an API and see if it's possible very quickly without wasting too much time today I hope to share my insights and experience across these organ ganizations in streamlining processes and showing you how we can approach things in a way that makes things easier for both your it Ops teams and for your users so let's take a look at what our

our webinar Series today is focused on so our title today is Mission Control Center in slack leveraging block kit and nadn for it Ops Mastery so my goal today is to show you just how powerful slack can be when it comes to tying different software together using their block kit Builder which you can think of block kit Builder as a UI Builder within slacks backend API it's kind of like a hidden series of popups and tooling that allows you to create user interfaces to allow users to stay within slack but then output that data to any platform that you want so today's agenda is going to be essentially how to make a mission control within slack to that end we're going to be talking a little bit about the benefits of staying within Slack black U we're going to demo a workflow that I've put together with modal popups we're going to do a deep dive into block kit we're going to talk a about a few gotchas that you'll need to be aware of to be able to utilize uh the platform effectively and we're going to be talking about itops General use cases now why would we use slack why not some other platform there's plenty of them as you can imagine and I think some of these answers are pretty self-explanatory so Slack as a central employee Hub many Enterprise level organizations are already using slack in this way essentially as a central place for people to communicate to work together and there's already many Integrations built into many popular softwares out there that essentially allow messaging to appear within slack to make the process much smoother this also will tie into how having messaging without automation can create challenges so if you get notifications that's great but if those notifications aren't actionable and you have to leave slack open up a new software log in Via SSO then go ahead and take action those steps over time in aggregate create a lot of friction with users and it leads to less than optimal work conditions for the end user so my goal today is to show you why combining n8n and block kit within slack can help reduce that friction and make life easier for both your users and your it Ops teams now let's talk a little bit about why users like it pretty straightforward no real learning curve it's basically a chat platform it creates a single source of Truth so people are able to chat in real time everybody can kind of stay up to date on what's going on within channels and I think most importantly is that it works seamlessly across both mobile and desktop and that to me is one of the bigger issues here because in Enterprise level organizations most times you are authorized to use software on your phone or at least slack but maybe not other systems maybe you have some kind of an SSO tool um which requires certain authentication so let's say your you're you need to log into your laptop to be able to access your ticketing system so if you need to submit a ticketing bug if you're in the airport you don't have time to pull out your laptop it's very difficult to essentially pull that out and log into your SSO make sure everything's set and then submit the ticket by the time you get to the ticket subm to the action part you've already had so much friction that it many times people don't even go through the the hassle of it and then they forget which can create issues so being able to just pop open your phone submit a ticket via slack and move on with your day can reduce the friction to a point where users don't mind essentially communicating those issues with other teams and that can help reduce some of the siloing issues that we see in some of the Enterprise organizations now how does this benefit our it Ops teams that are the ones in the back end making sure that we're not getting hacked that we're not you know that our teams are following procedures and processes and are utilizing the right tools within slack we have granular permissions already built in and we can tie block kit Builder into these permissions or into these teams to allow for granular team-based access this will simplify your logging and auditing as well as you only have to have a single source of Truth your slack directory to essentially allow for iding and integrating within other operations and systems we can also create team-based permission restrictions so it helps make things a little bit quicker um it's agnostic of backend and front end so what we can do is using the block kit we can allow for teams to utilize whatever platforms they want for their backend work so if you have a support team that wants to use for example jira or linear for example you can have them use it but you the part is getting the front-end users to learn how to utilize jira or linear or even other tools like notion many times the front-end users like sales teams or customer support teams don't want to learn other teams platforms just to be able to submit a ticket so not only that but when those systems change it creates friction in teams having to learn other systems just to be able B to do the same thing they used to do one way now they have to do it a different way by decoupling the front end from that system and tying into that system's API you can keep a standardized front-end process and even if the backend process changes it's just a matter of changing an n8n workflow one time and the users don't even know that the system is changed they shouldn't have to the other thing is cost savings we don't want to have to purchase more uis more systems more Form Tools just to be able to utilize a central Hub system and that leads us to using slack as a mission control center now to do this we're going to use block kit now what is block kit right you might be asking block kit is the UI Builder or the UI tools that allow you to create these UI so I've got some examples here on the slide to essentially allow your teams to submit you know data into different systems and that's usually what we're doing is typically we'll have a front-end team submitting data from one system to another and how can we get that system from point A to point B in as efficient time as possible with the least amount of friction that is our goal so on the next slide what we're going to be looking at is an example of how block kit makes this process simple so I've put together a tool that we use internally here at nadn and this tool allows us to upload images on to an S3 bucket using that we utilize via cloudflare to host public images for marketing purposes so if I'm looking to upload an image that I'm going to use in a workflow I can essentially upload it copy the URL and then paste it and that is now a Public Image that I can link to anywhere this allows us to have control over our images and we don't have to use a third-party service like injure or you know Dropbox or something like that to publicly host images so let's see how this works in slack I'm going to be U showing a little demo video and then from there we'll actually dive into the tool itself so you can see how it works so here it is here's our nadn lab

slack instance we just hit the back slash here and as you can see we get a list of our Global shortcuts here is our file upload process so here we can choose to either create a new folder as you can see I don't even have to click a submit button it just takes me to the new folder Creator now I've already got a folder created for this so I'm not going to utilize this functionality let's go ahead and look at all of our folders and that was the main reason for this tool is I needed a way to see all of our tool all of our folders rather um and here all I have to do is type in the word all it sends it to another workflow that queries them sends the data back to block kit and here I can choose which folder I want to use I can utilize the upload process within um slack itself natively now you do need to do a little bit of validation so the S3 bucket does not allow for special characters so I'm going to go ahead and fix that in this image um and just clean up the text this is something that you can do in nadn without having to do it manually like I'm doing here so there we go the image is being uploaded to slack servers we go ahead and hit the upload button at the bottom right hand corner and that can be customized to say whatever you like and there we go the image is now uploaded and as you can see it's even ex expanding the image to be visual within the platform because it's a public facing image so now I can copy that URL and I'm good to go now this is all powered by this uh nadn workflow so this workflow that we're looking at here we're going to take a look at this live here in just a moment um essentially Powers this whole thing so that initial popup when you hit the global uh when you type in the shortcut Powers this modal popup then when you select one of the two options it chooses one of these two popups and when you submit the file it goes down this path and it uploads the file here to our S3 bucket and it Loops up to 10 times across those files and then it displays an aggregate of all 10 files with different links for each one now let's look at this live so I'm going to go ahead and pull up our slack instance again and I'm going to upload an image here so I'm just going to go back slash upload an image here it is once again I'm going to use an existing folder just like before and again here I'm going to type in all and this functionality right here so we are limited into the number of elements that we put within the block kit Builder I think it's a 100 elements that you can only have here now we may have more than 100 folders so I'm using a functionality within block kit that allows you to query an API and return back a curated list of values it's not being snored in Block kit it's actually using an API to display this so let's take a look I'm going to go ahead and do test folder here I'm going to go ahead and upload and then we're going to do slack once that uploads up to slack servers we're going to go ahead and hit upload we'll give it just a moment and there it is excellent there's our image now the reason I did this live is because I want to be able to show this to you in the back end so I've gone ahead and pulled up our workflow here let's go ahead and take a look at our executions are essentially the processes as they have fired live so that we can play with them so I'm going to start with the first

one let's dive right into it and what I'm going to do this is one of our Pro features here but I'm going to go ahead and copy it into our editor so we can play around with this and see this live so I'm going to hit copy to editor I'm going to unpin this data and there we go so let's go ahead and zoom in so this is a little bit easier to view and as you can see we have a green line that dictates where the data flowed so essentially the first was our web hook so slack is sending this data straight to our nadn web hook here we take the contents of that web hook and we essentially interpret it into Json so it starts out as this string object that we'll go ahead and see here so here's the payload so it's just a string Json object and what we want is to convert this from a string to an actual Json object that nadn understands so here we've called that object response and we've made sure to choose the Json object so that it recognizes that it's supposed to be a Json object like we see here on the right um and here we have put it we have basically clicked and dragged the payload here that allows us to then get this so this is the input and this is the output and that's one of the reasons I love naden it's very simple every one of these and we call these nodes nodes has an input and an output and that's it now here we need to Route the data So within block kit there are different like anchors if you will that tell it what type of data it is so if we open this up you'll notice that there are three different routes that the web hooks can take so the first one is idea selector and what we're doing is looking for anything that is equal under callback ID under response. callback ID to idea selector that's the name of this app and we can change it to whatever we want within block kit for now this is the one I chose and this is the same name as another one that I used previously so I probably should have renamed it to image upload um but I never got around to it um then we have block actions so this is when we click on one of those uh either to create a folder or upload a folder so those are that's under here we can see it says shortcut but it does not match Block action so shortcut in this case is essentially the actual Global shortcut that made it pop up and then block AC oh and then submit data here is if it showed under if it showed up as view submission it would have been the submission of the data so here as you can see we're actually going to go through the first route and so here we can see that that's exactly what happened um we've responded to Slack's web hook letting it know hey we got the web hook call thank you so much you're good to go that way slack knows that everything's working on our app and then here is where we have the response so this actually should be going in the header uh not in the um in the query parameter it still works regardless but that was a mistake on my end um but no big deal still works just fine but if we scroll down to the bottom here is where the important portion is so I'm just going to expand this and as you can see here we have so I want you to imagine that this is broken down into two portions and we're working internally to get this made a little bit easier so that you only have to paste this portion because this portion is really where the block kit begins everything Bel before this is essentially a container a little holder that gives slack some context and lets it know hey this is the person that requested this is the trigger ID and as you can see it's a very long trigger ID um on the right but essentially it tells it hey this is where the data or the response or the modal popup needs to go to but what I want to show you is on the right hand side so here as you can see we even have the person's name being sent in from the web hook so that allows it us to make it very customized make it feel like we're connected to the person in question so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to copy this right here starting at that first squiggly work my way down and I'm going to copy this and what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into slack block kit Builder so you can access this right here let me delete

this there we go and this takes you to the slack block kit Builder so very simple very easy to do um you can essentially come here to the right hand side select all and paste oops I made a mistake so very easy to do what you need to do first is essentially go to uh modal preview because this is a modal popup and now it's working correctly so I'm just going to paste it once more and there we are hey Angel um need to upload an image blah blah so here we go so this is our block kit image now if I want to customize this it's as easy as on the left hand side clicking on button and there we go now if I scroll down to the bottom and maybe instead of saying click me I can say visit website since it's a button and there we go it updates in real time now the beauty of using block hit is that I can essentially copy this URL and send it to a department head and say hey is this UI look good to you can we utilize this in your popup so essentially just by copying this URL here at the top sending it via slack as well to another team member when they click on the link it'll take them directly to this it'll fill out all this Json and everything they can make changes they can be like uh this visit website isn't really necessary let's go ahead and remove it okay great I'm going to go ahead and copy this and send this back to the other team member and this allows for easy collaboration it's not quite uh you know Google drive or Google Sheets level collaboration but it is very simple and easy to utilize now once we've gone ahead and created our UI what we can do is we can head back in here and we can take and essentially paste it into the view container so again where you put it is very important this is one of those gotchas that you need to be aware of essentially making sure that you include this portion and I'm going to include this template on our show notes so feel free to utilize the the link essentially use my template as your starting ground so you don't have to start from scratch and all you need to really do is change this view I do it all the time that way I don't have to start from scratch it's one of the things I really like about nadn is that you really own your own workflows you can SA them to your Google drive somewhere you back I use GitHub but you can save them and then reuse them as templates for yourself now what this does is it gives you that popup so let's take a look at the other executions so I'm going to go ahead and copy these to editor as well this is the second one this is where we chose the select folder so you'll notice it's the same thing and all I'm going to do here is copy The View once more so I'm going to scroll down to the bottom there we go copy and I'm going to go ahead and paste there we go now once we do that you'll notice that here we have that search for existing uh folder name um we have our binary upload now here's another gotcha so image file binary this a file upload couple of things the maximum number of files you can allow is up to 10 so if you have a workflow that only requires one or two you can set that here as a limit and the system will limit it but you can't go over 10 it won't work um but the other thing you can do is allow specific kinds of file types so in this case I know that we don't want to host anything other than jpegs pgs and PDFs so here we can essentially limit those by adding them as needed so if I wanted to for example add um jpeg we could do that as well no problem so that essentially is one of the things to keep out keep an eye out for but more importantly there is no file upload option here on the left you'll notice that that's something that they did not include um this is something that I still don't fully understand why now I will include all you have to do is take and copy this snippet right here and paste it into the Json code and it'll work just fine with block kit Builder it does add another level of complexity but I find that it's worth it again just to reduce the need to upload files to some other third-party repository since slack has the ability to store these files so I'm going to include a link to where in the documentation you can copy this snippet and use it yourself um but again another kind of got you to keep an eye out for and another important gotcha here is block ID and action ID these two right here by default when you use one of these so let's say I add a markdown to this or actually markdown is an actionable so let's not do that one Let's do an input of some kind let's do a button there we go we have a button right there so as you can see we do we have an action ID defined here so it will allow you to customize it but if we do something like uh the folder selector so let's see here where is it section greeting section tool selector right here so block ID so this is what I'm talking about you won't always have these block IDs visible so if I add another button down here so let's get rid of the original one so we have our action ID but we don't always have a block ID and the reason that this is important the reason that you may want to add a block ID is because within the platform if you don't Define one it will create one for you and it's usually randomly generated which makes it very hard to Target this specific section within block kit when routing data so usually what I'll do is I'll say hey look for the block ID tool selector to find the input that we're receiving for this search for folder name now if I don't Define this I don't actually have to have this so like for example we could remove it and it still works just fine but now it's going to randomly generate a block ID which means that I don't know what it is I can't put an if check or a routing uh block switch in nadn to find it which makes it very difficult so what I recommend chat GPT is amazing at generating templates out of the box for block kit so I recommend you know if you have an idea of an input you want I would just go into chat gbt and say something like create a block kit template you know for uh for this type of input and please make sure to include block IDs and then it'll include them for you can paste them in here to make sure that it didn't hallucinate something and utilize that in & end to ensure that you get the same input every single time um and these blocks are all essentially you can think of these as labels for each of these blocks they don't always if you create it doesn't using this tool here on the left it doesn't always create it in the tool so again a very important gotcha so let's head back into the tool and let's take a look at the last step so we've talked a little bit about how these popups work let's go into

executions and let's make our way down to the last step so it would be the most recent one run let's go ahead and copy to editor unpin and there we go excellent so here we go so here we're going to close the modal popup essentially saying hey we've done our job we've submitted the data we need we no longer need this popup it's very straightforward it's just a response body of clear telling slack hey you can clear out the user interface it's no longer needed or instead you could actually display uh there are ways to display another block kit interface saying hey it's been successfully uploaded or something along those lines but typically I just like to post the results into a channel for Simplicity now I've added a routing action here that isn't particularly necessary you can actually completely remove this my thought process essentially is to upgrade this in the future to allow for the deletion of files within folders because again this S3 bucket is not fully accessible so what I want to do is essentially expose just the file deletion portion to our users so essentially what I'll eventually do is add a secondary output here that essentially allows you to delete files so we'll submit files for deletion and it'll run this S3 bucket but for delete instead of upload and it'll just bring in the definition so for now you can delete this is not necessary at all and it's not actually doing anything now let's talk about splitting out files so one of the things within nadn that takes a little bit of practice is understanding how the loop system works now I find the looping in naden to be very easy to use because it keeps track of how many objects are in the loop so as you can see there's one object it's only going to Loop one time and even it says two it means it executed twice it looped once and then it outputed once so that's why it says two but it knows exactly how many Loops it needs to do automatically based on the number of objects it receives that number is based on an array a Json array essentially an array being this Square brackets that we see here in Json so essentially here you can see we've got one uh one item that came in here and in here we have a bunch of data essentially an object within it so what we're doing here is we're getting rid of this whole response because as you can see if we switch to Json view here we have all this extra data but what we really care about and we can see it here response view State value so let's find that here response so we're going to find response view so here's View and we're going to ignore blocks here's state essentially is like the output so State values input block there it is input block file input action and then here is the file so here what we've done is I've just clicked and dragged this in here to split everything that essentially will be in this square brackets this array object into just that output so it gets rid of everything else that we've received in this object and only keeps what's in here and what this allows us to do is it runs the loop as many times as there are files which makes life so much easier and that's essentially what we're doing here so We're looping through each one the first step is that we're going to download the file locally so here we're using um the HTTP request uh node now you've seen this already a few times um in the the modal popups you can think of this as the Swiss army knife of of n8n essentially so what it allows you to do is perform these HTTP requests um you might know them as curl requests or you know get requests or post requests but one of the beautiful things about nadn is that you can utilize your credentials here which is usually the hardest part of these requests so even if we haven't built support for example within slack for this download option you can still go into the do API documentation copy the correct uh method and imported as curl here and then just make sure you set your credential type as long as you've set up credentials in the other node for that uh software it'll work just fine here and that's what we're doing here essentially what we're doing is we're saying Hey I want you to download the file locally and that's what we have here we have a data object instead or a binary object rather instead of a Json object and this binary object if I click view should look very familiar there here's our slack logo I could even download it to my computer if I want no problem now what we're doing is we're telling it hey make sure that we download this as a file and call it data and we could call it image or whatever we want I just called it data because that's the default now the upload to S3 bucket has a requirement to upload a binary file so it wants to know what the name of that binary object is so here we have our data object and then here we can tell it what folder and essentially what the file name is so what I'm doing is I'm passing it here you can see the split here's the folder I'm pulling it from the response in the original uh web hook call under parse web hook right here and the same for the file name I'm getting that from the split out or I'm sorry from the loop over items so in I can see where I'm at in the index so I'm telling it hey give me the file name which it should be right here so I'm telling it give me the file name from The Loop and give me the folder name from the um from the web hook call and then I'm basically combining these to let the S3 bucket know where to upload it and so that's essentially it now we're going to either get success true or success false and what we're doing here now is because We're looping if it fails we don't want the whole operation to stop we want it to keep going um but we need to know if it worked or not so essentially what we're doing is we're making a little Json note saying hey yep we were successful um here's the link right here and then what we're going to do is we're going to lump all of these outputs together in a way that block kit understands and so what I'm doing is I'm creating that block kit manually here so essentially I'm creating it in a way we'll take a look at it here in a moment when we get to the end but this essentially will be comma separated with any other files that we need to in the block kit object that we're going to create as a response to our slack Channel once we do that we're going to move on to the next object this is just a no operation node think of it as like a comment node essentially um and we're going to just Loop through these through as many files as we get up to 10 and then it'll be done now here again we have our no operation this is not necessary we can delete it um think of it again is a comment node um I have it here sometimes at the end of a loop just to give me a way to hit the play button but to Loop through it and end here it's just an easy way to trigger the full loop um but stop at before it goes to the next step and then here what we're doing is joining all of these together um into one object so if we had 10 files we would have 10 outputs here we combine them into one and then last but not least we then post these to slack now again this is back again to block kit so if I open up block kit here this is the block kit template that we're using so I'm going to go ahead and copy this and instead of modal I'm going to do message and there we go now we can see essentially what it looks like and if we wanted to customize it you know maybe delete file or something we could create like a little quick delete option here so we could just go into the slack Channel hit the delete button um it would essentially allow it delete file it would allow for a quick way for file deletion without having to essentially go through a whole another interface within slack or another modal popup or searching for it essentially for now we'll leave that off but that's essentially it so now that gets posted into our slack Channel we can copy the link and we can utilize this now you might be asking what are some other ways that this is helpful right image uploads are fine and dandy but how does that help me you know maybe our team don't do file uploads maybe we just do ticketing or things like that

and so to that end let's take a look at some of the other tools that we have here so one of the other ones we have submit an idea let's go ahead and pull that up so this is where I was talking about earlier that you can essentially remove the silos that might be in your Enterprise organization so we had a slight problem internally here at NN our product team loves notion but our support team likes linear and that creates an issue that creates a little bit of a frustration for the users because the users have to learn both of these systems and not only that but systems like notion are can be very complex depending on how you set them up and are we setting up a template a database a page how are we doing this and then they have to learn those specific gotes within that platform so what I've created is a tool that essentially makes them device agnostic so if you click on bug submission for example we'll go ahead and click on that submitting this will submit it to linear whereas if we select product idea it will automatically submit this to notion so let's take a quick look at the logic on the back end here so if we go to NN projects we go to idea bot you'll notice that the layout and structure is very similar ilar so here we have our initial kind of menu popup we have our product idea modal popup our paino bug submission popups and these will route the data through the submit data option here and then it gets further routed to the correct tool so here as you can see um we are essentially getting the user ID so that we can get an email address and then here we are submitting it to the correct database in notion and down here instead we're submitting it to the right database in linear instead so essentially you can connect this to any number of backend systems but keep the user experience very simple and for example down the road if we are no longer using linear and it instead switches to a different tooling all I have to do is swap out this linear tool or this linear node rather for whatever API node or even the HTTP request if we don't actually have support for this new tool I can essentially just map in a new node replace the inputs essentially remain the same so if I open this up you can see here's a bug name here's created by ID and then the expected action so all I'd need to copy are these variables right here and essentially the data would be mapped into the new node I wouldn't really it would take me maybe 10 to 20 minutes to update this workflow to support a different system because all the hard work is already been done in getting the data needed another use case that I've seen um is for example um for devops so if we exit out of here and we hit this we can do request certificate so we'll give it a moment and this brings up our Veni certificate generator so this also highlights a different way of doing things so here for example we what we can do is we can automate some tasks but we can also put a human in front of some other tasks that might be a little bit more um that might be require human intervention so for example here I might if I'm a bigger uh organization I might want to set up a new domain for our organization I'll you know type in the domain name select a validity period um and maybe add some notes now you'll notice it doesn't ask for my information for my team because all that information is already going to be sent via that slack web hook now I can't show you this one live because my veny uh server is no longer active um but let's take a look at the workflow behind it all right here it is let's go ahead and take a look at the workflow behind it so I'm going to click on this and again very similar now you'll notice that we only have one here there's no need to give multiple options we only have one submission process here so we just have that ini popup here you'll notice that there is a process for virus total so what we're doing here is we're allowing the automated system to make a decision so we're passing it into virus total's um essentially URL analysis tool for reputation management what we're doing here essentially is seeing hey does this rep does this URL have a good or bad reputation once we get the output we'll essentially have an if check to see if the reputation score meets our threshold so in here let's take a look so if it has less than zero malicious reports I'm just going to go ahead and have it auto isue the SSL certificate give a uh send the confirmation to our slack Channel and call it a day no human is needed now if it does have malicious reports we're not going to autosubmit it instead we're going to have if you can actually replace this AI agent with a local AI agent or with chat gbt whatever you prefer but we're going to have it generate a report that's human readable and then we're going to have it post to our slack Channel that's going to include a button that if a human presses that button within the correct team it'll then Auto isue the certificate essentially reducing the poor it Ops teams work down to one click and to see this in action let's take a look so we have our Certificate request channel so this is what a uh an auto issued certificate looks like so no malicious uh reports everything's good we can view the CSR details on the Veni side we can revoke it if we feel it should not be live anymore now if it is malicious as you can see here we give a slightly scarier message saying hey there might be a problem here this is the person who requested it this is the score and here's a slight you know AI analysis and a risk assessment so and then here we have our next steps so essentially this is this was I believe all generated by the AI report and so here by pressing the submit for approval we can essentially bypass the warning and go ahead and auto isue the certificate so essentially sometimes the processes don't need to be fully automated but they do need to be made simpler so that the humans can kind of take a step in take a look make sure everything's okay but then we again reduce that humans work down to the smallest number of clicks one if possible to do their job so and then we have it here now because we're getting all this information here we can also add nodes here to audit this so we can sit maybe have a Google sheet hopefully not but some kind of a database that will log the user data that we received from slack to the database saying hey employee XYZ John Doe he submitted this for approval and if for some reason there's backlash down the road because it shouldn't have been approved we can go look at that database and say hey employee XYZ why did you approve this you know and kind of follow it back down the chain of command so these are all I think different ways of incorporating the same block kit process within slack to help make life easier for both the users and it Ops teams and the I and the block kit system within slack is so flexible and so powerful that I feel that we've only scratched the surface of what's possible now let's go ahead and jump back into our slides real quick let's kind of

summarize a little bit about what we've learned today so a couple of let's kind of go over our gotchas once more make sure that you have block IDs if you don't it's going to give you a headache when you build things using the block kit Builder very important make sure that they have block IDs make sure that you customize them so that the outputs are not randomly generated um the file upload option does not exist within the block kit Builder so you I will include a link in the show notes that takes you to the uh documentation page for it that you can just copy the snippet and change it to your heart's content um and then the other thing is for the uh HTTP request moduls those currently are not fully supported within nadn you do need to use our Swiss army knife this the HTTP request tool but essentially it is very easy to do and using the template that I'm going to provide also in the show notes for this it doesn't take very long or much time at all to just use my template to replace that view object that we looked earlier so to summarize again some of the big picture it Ops uses onboarding offboarding I think are great ways to utilize this system um either through an automated fashion by listening to new employees being added to the directory or you know using the modal popups for having a manager fill out you know a report of a new user to say hey this has been hired or for human resources for employees themselves to be able to essentially ask questions or submit tickets Behavior Analysis you can actually listen to events in slack channels and have them feed into an nadn workflow and take action if needed welcome messages although I believe slack does offer this as well knowledge aggregation skill tracking things like that same for HR I think is a great way to utilize this platform to request you know tool access collect unboarding feedback because everything comes in through web hook requests you can feed these into some kind of auditing tool that you might have internally and again it makes things platform agnostic which is key in Enterprise uh organizations and lastly I feel like devops has an advantage when using these tools because devops already understands the basics of programming and the under their those teams understand essentially how environments work that allows them to deploy naden if they want to use for example the Community Edition to try this workflow out and deploy it into a secure internal environment see how it works and then they can also build workflows as well so if you have a devops team you have an advantage I believe over some organization that don't so we've covered the basics of using slack and &n today to create powerful uis and workflows so essentially from streamlining it operations to connecting different silos within different teams I believe that this solution can help just about any Enterprise or it Ops organization bring everything together into one place so I do want to remind you don't forget sign up for future webinar events I look forward to having more these in the future and my hope is that we can do these live so as you have questions you can ask them and I can answer them live um over the video as well so thank you for joining today's session I look forward to your questions and feel free to leave any questions you might have in the comments it's been a pleasure and happy flow gramming