Welcome back to our second edition! In January, we kicked off this series to help you keep up with the constant stream of new features and enhancements in the Slack ecosystem. The positive feedback was fantastic, and I’m excited to continue the journey with you.
February was another busy month, packed with powerful updates for admins, major upgrades for developers, and the arrival of Slack AI in a place everyone can try it.
Let’s dive into the updates for February!
Community & Admin Updates
Slack AI Arrives in the Slack Community Workspace
This is a huge opportunity for everyone! By joining the official Slack Community workspace, you can now learn about and test built-in Slack AI functionality for free.
Disconnect Slack Connect External Users
Admins on Enterprise Grid, Business+, and compliance-enabled plans now have a more powerful way to end collaboration with an external user. Disconnecting an external user ensures they are completely removed from your organization. This action:
- Removes them from all channels hosted by your organization.
- Revokes their ability to collaborate via Slack Connect Direct Messages, canvases, and lists.
- Disconnects your organization from any channels owned by other organizations that you share with the disconnected user.
Why it matters: This feature provides comprehensive control for securely managing external relationships, enhancing your security posture by ensuring no lingering connections remain and allowing you to act fast when you need to revoke access.
Clearer Do Not Disturb (DND) Notifications
You’ll soon see clearer language around how DND and paused notifications interact with your designated “VIPs” (people whose notifications can break through DND). This subtle but helpful tweak, rolling out now, will help set clearer expectations.
New Vision-Assistive Slack Themes You can find new themes designed for vision assistance under Preferences > Appearance > Slack themes > Vision Assistive.
General News & Features
New Partner Offers: The Slack Partner Offers Marketplace has new exclusive deals for Slack customers. We’re excited to welcome Heroku, Drata, and more to the lineup!
New Workshop: Looking for a fun way to explore Workflow Builder? Check out the new hands-on workshop at slack.dev where you’ll learn to build a random reaction GIF generator.
Slack’s search is being enhanced to be faster, more accurate, and ready for the AI era. The system is designed to respect the complex permission and compliance boundaries of your organization while making it easy to find what you need. This is especially important for new AI tools like Agentforce, which can tap into this permission-aware knowledge to provide smarter, more secure responses.
Here’s how it works:
- Granular Visibility by Design: Search results are filtered based on channel type and your membership, ensuring you only see messages and files you are explicitly allowed to access, whether they are in public channels, private channels, or DMs.
- Ready for AI: The search architecture powers AI features like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), allowing
Workflow Builder Gets Major Upgrades
A More Ergonomic Action Library Slack has updated how you browse and select workflow actions. Based on user feedback, the experience is now in a focused modal that improves discovery, highlights third-party connectors, and has significantly improved accessibility. Plus, a new search shortcut (F) makes it super fast to find and add an action.
Improved Discovery for Generated Forms
A new entry point for generating forms in steps (like connectors and lists) makes the feature clearer and more user-friendly. You can now easily find the “Add form” and “Remove form” buttons to modify steps.
Automate Salesforce Record Collaboration
You can now pull Opportunity Team Members, Account Team Members, and Case Team Members into any Workflow Builder step. This allows you to automate collaboration by adding the right team to a channel, updating a list with their names, or sending notifications—all without manually managing channel membership.
Duplicate a Step
A small but highly requested feature: you can now duplicate workflow steps with a single click from the in-line menu.
Small but Impactful Enhancements
- Variable names no longer count against character limits in text fields.
- Workflows using “When a reaction is added” will now warn you if they rely on an invalid emoji.
- The “Pin a message” step now correctly advises you to include a “Send message to channel” step first.
Enterprise Grid: Security & Management
Admin Advisor: Helping Admins Secure Slack Say hello to Admin Advisor, a new tool for Organization Admins and Owners. It raises awareness of key security settings, calls you to action when new settings are released, and reminds you to review areas of concern like security anomalies. You can review, archive, or snooze recommendation cards.
Coming Soon: Admin Advisor will be available for non-Grid plans.
Automated Responses to Anomaly Events
When certain anomaly events are detected in the audit logs Slack will be able to automatically end the acting user’s sessions. You can manage which events trigger this response and which admins are notified.
Other Enterprise News
- Org Owners and Admins can now use the external people dashboard to disconnect external people from the organization.
- You can now export a summary of your org’s security settings as a CSV.
- New tools for content flagging are available, including the ability for members to flag content from external people.
- You can now remove all external people from Slack Connect channels, regardless of whether they have permission only to post, or permission to post, invite, and more.
For Developers
Version 3.0.0 of the Automation Platform Tools is Here! This is a major release packed with valuable updates. We also have an update from the CLI team that will be your valentine!
Key Changes & New Commands:
- Official Bolt Support: The Slack CLI now officially supports Bolt for JavaScript and Bolt for Python!
slack init: A new command to initialize an existing Bolt or Deno project with Slack CLI support.slack create: The creation journey has been updated to let you choose between Bolt for JS/Python and Deno app types.- Sub-directory Support: You can now run CLI commands from within project sub-directories (Version 2.33.0 ).
- Configuration File Update:
slack.jsonhas been renamed to.slack/hooks.jsonto better organize project files.slack.jsonis still supported for existing projects.
Deprecations:
- The standalone
denocommand has been fully removed. You should now use thedenoexecutable directly. - Support for pre-release Deno Slack SDK versions that used
slack.yamlandproject.tshas been removed.
New Block Kit Block:
Salesforce & Slack
Agentforce Slack Actions Have Arrived Starting February 19th, you can use three brand-new, pre-built Slack skills in Agentforce: create and update canvases, send direct messages, and look up users.
Slack Community Migration Complete The Slack Community forums have now officially been migrated to the Trailblazer Community.
Wrapping Up February
And that’s a wrap on our February updates! From major new tools for developers and admins to the exciting arrival of Slack AI in the community, there was a lot to cover. My hope is that these summaries help you focus on what matters most to you and your team.
I’m already gathering the news for March, so be sure to join me again next month for the next roundup.
Until then, happy collaborating!
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