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Slack

The kapa platform provides an integration to ingest past conversations from Slack channels as a data source. Community Slack channels contain a lot of helpful information often in the form of support answers team members have provided. However, Slack channels are not meant for archiving information for other users. Great answers are not useful to anybody except the original poster because other users can not effectively search Slack. Kapa offers a way of making your past conversations on Slack useful to everyone by indexing them as a data source.

Set up​

The kapa platform needs to authenticate itself against your Slack workspace in order to access it. The simplest way of doing this is through a new slack app.

Step 1: Create a Slack App​

  1. Navigate to your Slack Apps
  2. Create a new app by clicking Create New App
  3. Select the appropriate workspace under Pick a workspace to develop your app in. The workspace should match the workspace from which you later want to ingest data.
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It is not sufficient to have the Kapa Slackbot installed. You need your own seperate slack app.

Step 2: Give the app the correct permissions​

Navigate to the OAuth & Permissions: page and add the following scopes:

  • channels:history
  • channels:read
  • groups:history
  • groups:read
  • metadata.message:read
  • team:read
  • users:read

Step 3: Install the app to your workspace​

  1. On the OAuth & Permissions page: Click Install to Workspace and authorize the app.
  2. Copy the Bot User OAuth Token. The token should begin with xoxb-.

Step 4: Choose a channel​

Pick a channel you would like kapa to ingest and copy the channel id. You can find the channel id at the bottom of the channel details.

Channel Details
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If you want to export multiple channels, repeat this step for each channel. You will have to create a separate source in the kapa.ai platform for each channel. You can use the same bot token for each source.

Step 5: Invite your bot to the channel​

This step might not always be necessary depending on the configuration of your Slack workspace. However, to ensure that the kapa platform can correctly access your channel simply invite your slackbot to it. This is always required if the channel is private.

Invite the slack app to the channel by typing /invite @<bot-name>.

Step 6: Configure a new Slack source in the kapa platform.​

By creating and configuring a new slack app you have created the means for the kapa platfrom to authenticate itself against your slack workspace and access its data. However, you still need to set up a new data source in the kapa platform.

Create a new source in the kapa platform and select Slack as the source type.

  1. Paste the copied bot token into the Bot Token field.
  2. Paste the copied channel ID into the Channel ID field.

kapa will validate the Bot Token and Channel ID together to check that all permissions are correct.

Slack Config

Best practices​

Tell kapa who to trust​

Community Slack conversations contain a lot of valuable information but they also contain a lot of false information since anybody can post. Use the Trusted Users config option to tell kapa which users in your Slack channel represent a reliable source of information. Here you can list your team members, external community managers, your most active community members and whoever else you trust to give a reliable answer.

If a significant number of answers in your community are provided by these individiuals we would highly recommend enabling the Only include threads that have answers from trusted users above option. Then kapa will only ingest threads from your Slack channel where one of these trusted users has answered. This is the best way to only ingest high quality content from Slack.