Manage Your Workflows

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Test a workflow.
  
• Edit a workflow.
  
• Apply workflow best practices.
  

Test Your Workflow

Once you’ve created a new workflow, we recommend triggering it privately before making it available to others. You can add it to a public test channel that isn't actively being used by others or create your own test channel. For even more security, you can limit ‌workflow permissions to a specific channel or person. Once you’re ready, simply update the permissions to make the workflow available to a larger audience.

Using the permissions settings, you can configure all access permissions, including who can find and copy the workflow and who can manage it with you.

Add Managers to Your Workflow

You probably won't be creating and managing workflows alone. Anyone you add as a manager on a workflow has the same permissions that you do as the workflow creator. Any workflow manager can add and remove other managers, including admins.

Here's what workflow managers can do.

• Change a workflow’s name, description, and custom icon.
  
• Edit or remove workflow steps.
  
• Adjust workflow permissions.
  
• View workflow activity.
  
• Unpublish or delete a workflow.
  
• Add or remove other workflow managers.
  
• Export a workflow.
  

Workspace Owners and Admins can add themselves as managers on any published workflow in their workspace. If admins add themselves as workflow managers in private channels they don't belong to, they won't be able to see the name of the channel.

View Your Workflows

If you have published and shared workflows in your Slack org, your teammates can find them in several different places in Slack.

Feature a Workflow

Slack users interact with your workflows in channels when you share a link or when they visit the channel. When you feature a workflow in channel, it appears in the menu bar to provide one-click access for channel members. This is a good way to put important workflows front and center.

Edit a Workflow

If you need to make changes to your workflow, you can edit it at any time. Workflow managers can find a workflow in Workflow Builder by searching by title, status, or most recently edited. Note that only workflow managers and Slack admins can see and manage your workflow in Workflow Builder.

While editing a workflow, you can:

• Modify the trigger
  
  • Some triggers can be edited after your workflow is published, such as emoji triggers and schedule triggers. If your workflow has never been published, you can choose a new trigger. To change the trigger of a published workflow, make a copy, pick a new trigger, and publish the new version.
    
• Modify the steps
  
  • Add and remove steps, or change how they work.
    
• Change workflow details
  
  • Add a new name, description, or custom image.
    
• Import or export a workflow
  
  • You can export workflows to share them outside of Slack. People you share the export file with can import the workflow into their workspace or organization.
    
• Update permissions
  
  • Add and remove workflow managers, plus change who can use and copy the workflow.
    
• Unpublish a workflow
  
  • For larger changes, you can unpublish the workflow first. This makes it temporarily unavailable to others while you make changes. Once the updated version is ready, simply republish the workflow.
    
• Delete a workflow
  
  • Permanently remove the workflow from Slack.
    

When you’re done editing your workflow, publish your changes to make them available to others.

Tips for Troubleshooting Editing Errors

When you encounter an error in editing your workflow, use the Activity and Settings tabs in Workflow Builder to investigate workflow errors.

Report on Your Workflow

If you’re a workflow manager, you can report on workflow activity and performance on the Activity tab of your workflow. You can filter by status, time frame, and specific people. You can also drill down into a specific instance when your workflow runs to investigate the details.

Tips for Building Great Workflows

Everyone’s workflows are unique, and so are their best practices. Here are a few tips and tricks to get you started. 

When creating and managing workflows, follow best practices like testing in a private channel, using variable data, sending confirmation messages, connecting tools, and making workflows discoverable. Use permissions settings to control access and add managers to help manage the workflow, like editing and reporting on existing workflows.

Now you know how to test, view, and edit workflows for your Slack workspaces. By adding managers to your workflows, you can get help monitoring and reporting existing workflows. Follow best practices and feature important workflows to help users automate their business processes with workflows.

Resources

• Slack Help: Build a workflow: Add and remove workflow managers
• Slack Help: Export and import Slack workflows
• Slack Help: Edit and manage your workflows