Notable Announcements for Your Team in Slack

How It Works

Type /notable in your chat command line, and it’ll hashtag your message as notable, and post it in the #general room. You can do this from any channel in Slack.

At the end of the day, you’ll also get emailed all the #notable announcements from the day. If you add additional hashtags, like #newfeature, your announcements will get grouped by these hashtags in the email:

Why the Harvest Team Uses Notable Announcements in Slack

How do we communicate important announcements to our 45 person team across nine different countries here at Harvest? We use a single email to aggregate all of the team’s notable messages for the day. It’s the one email that everyone on the team reads every day. It highlights notable things like:

• Hey team, we shipped this new feature today. It’s out to 75% of customers.
• Reminder that our Summit is in NYC next week. Please remember to bring a gift for the gift exchange!
• Eike and his wife had a baby boy!

This email highlights notable, company-wide announcements so that they don’t get lost amid GIFs and emojis in Slack.

Installing Notable Announcements for Your Team

Before you begin, you’ll need:

• a Slack account
• a Heroku account (free)
• a way to send email via SMTP

Now let’s get started:

1. Create A New App in Heroku

2. Get Your API Keys from Slack

• Login to your Slack account and go to Integrations.
• Scoll to the bottom of the page to the DIY Integrations & Customizations section and click View on Slash Commands.



• Enter /notable in the Choose a Command field and click Add Slash Command Integration.
• Copy the Token provided on the next page and copy it into the SLACK_TOKEN field of the Heroku form. Leave this Slack page open.



• In a new Slack window, go to the Slack Web API page.
• Down in the Authentication section, click Create Token for the Slack account which you would like to use Notable Announcements.



• Copy that token into the SLACK_API_TOKEN field in Heroku.

3. Final Steps in Heroku

• Fill in the remaining fields of the Heroku form. Enter the email you want the daily digests to get sent to in the TO_EMAIL field. Provide a TO_NAME for the email. Similarly, enter in the email address you would like the email to be sent from and the name of that in FROM_EMAIL and FROM_NAME.
• Click Deploy for Free in Heroku.
• To setup the daily emails, click Heroku Scheduler. Click Add new job and indicate the name of the job, and frequency and time you would like the email to be sent at. Set the Heroku scheduler task to be send_digest.
• Lastly, take the URL of your app from under Settings in Heroku and copy this into the URL field of your Slack Slash Commands page. If your app name is heroku-notable-test in Heroku, then your URL will be https://heroku-notable-test.herokuapp.com/notes.



• Fill out the rest of the Slash Commands page fields in Slack as you wish and click Save Integration.

That's it! You're ready to starting using /notable in Slack!

Support

Have questions or issues? Contact Harvest support and we’ll help you sort it out.