Workbot for Slack: Customize or Create Your Own Workbot commands

Workbot for Slack: Customize or Create Your Own Workbot commands

You can use Workbot for Slack to send commands to your apps to do things, such as show details for a product or account, show list of opportunities or invoices or tickets, or to create or update existing objects. How does this happen and how can you customize it for your company? 

Let's take a quick look..

Note : Customization of Workbot needs the full version of Workato platform, learn more about the pricing and features available in Workato here

• First let's understand how a bot handles commands, and then
• How it handles Notifications, next see
• How to customize a bot, and last
• Create one that responds to custom command and interacts with multiple apps

How does a Bot Work

A Workbot's underlying gears and bolts that makes it tick is call a Workato Recipe. A Workato Recipes are well structured for user's integrations between applcations, and usually runs in the background that automate certain business tasks. However, with Workato Recipe powering Workbot in your Slack, that means you can create any kind of integration logics, simple and complex, and have them on demand on your Slack itself. For a Workato Recipe to get the Workbot extensions, there is a connector call Workbot on Workato that assist on this. 

Workbot experience = Workato Recipes + Bot Commands + Bot notifications.

Bot Commands

Behind every command is a bot that is waiting to serve you. Each bot is listening for commands that are 

• addressed to an Application, such as Salesforce 
• is for a specific document, such as a product
• and is executing a certain command - Show
• And it takes one or more parameters

These are all the fields available in a Post Command reply action. We will get into the details of each field means in the later part of the section.

Here is what the Post Command Reply action's output will look like in Slack : 

Bot Notifications

Bots can also listen for activity inside the app and notify you of events of interest. For example in the example below, it is looking for Closed/Won notifications and sending it to the channel. It will send it to the channel from where the notifications were enabled. You can create our own notifications or modify existing ones to suit your needs.

And the End result of a Post Notification Action in Slack :

Learn more about the Post Notification Step here

Bot Customization

You can customize the existing commands or notifications by just changing the script for the bot. Or you could create new commands or notifications. Let's take a look. Here we are on the My Recipes page. To create a new one, we copy an existing recipe (you could create it from scratch as well, but why?), and change the recipe. For the notification recipe, the cloned recipe was changed to ignore orders less than 5000. For the Product show recipe, the command was changed to get item.

Creating your own Workbot functions require a minimum required understanding of the Workato platform. To get started, click here.

Creating a completely new command with all your own vocabulary is as easy, and while you are at it, with Workato Recipes you can have your Workbot command to combine data from multiple apps.Here's an example. As a Project manager you may be introduced to new users that work in the same project, and you may need create new them in QuickBooks as new customers. You would then need an automation that create a customer in QuickBooks from a Salesforce Account. 

With Workato recipe, I can now create my own Workbot command that does the sync on demand.  You can specify the command, the App itself, and the values needed to perform the action. In this case, the application will be QBO, my customer as cust and the action as copyfromsf. The work to be done: 

• lookup the customer in QuickBooks, 
• if not there lookup the account in salesforce and then 
• copy the data to create a customer

With the below configuration, calling command copyfromsf cust name:UnitedSF on Slack will now perform the above integration, and creates a new Account in Salesforce only when necessary.