Make your intranet available on Slack with a chatbot

by Chris McGrath | May 7, 2018

Many organizations that adopt Slack see it used very heavily by certain employees. This directly impacts intranet usage. In Slack-heavy organizations, many employees are using the intranet less frequently, if not forgetting about it altogether.

Rather than trying to reverse this behavior, some internal comms teams are working to accommodate it. Over the last few weeks, we’ve worked with an organization to bring their intranet into Slack by means of a chatbot.

The core of the Slack/Intranet integration is a chatbot that understands normal language. When the user types a question in Slack, first the chatbot looks to see if it’s a common question with a curated answer, such as “When’s payday?” or “How do I file an expense report?” If there’s no curated answer, the query is sent to the intranet search engine, and the intranet search results are presented within Slack. The user can either read the content in Slack, or follow a link to the actual intranet. Watch a brief demo on YouTube:

Our intranet connector works with any intranet that has an API, but so far we’ve built examples for Igloo, SharePoint and Google G Suite. In addition to Slack, other messaging apps are supported, including Skype for Business, Teams, and Work Chat by Facebook.

The ultimate intranet makes the right content available, at the right time, in the right place. Making intranets available over the cloud and on mobile is a good step in this direction. But as Slack becomes the center of activity for many employees, making the intranet available from there is the next natural progression towards a ubiquitous intranet.