My name is Sharrifah, and I lead business development and partnerships at Asana. As some of you know, we have a “light” integration with Slack and we’re looking to improve it. As with any feature or integration launch, feedback from customers is incredibly valuable. If you have the time, I’d love to know your thoughts on some or all the questions below.
What features of Asana’s integration with Slack do you know about?
What features, if any, of Asana’s integration with Slack do you actually use?
What new functionality or changes do you want to see in Asana’s integration with Slack?
When you see a task from Asana in Slack, what information would be most useful and what actions would you like to take on it?
What’s the biggest value you get (or would like to get) from Asana’s integration with Slack?
I don’t use it, but I know it does the basic things like lets me create and complete tasks.
I think above all things, I want to be able to have a robust activity feed in slack. I just enabled the new updates for Google Drive integration - it functions a bit as a bot that updates me on comments to documents, new shares, etc. I want something like that for Asana. I want to be able to see that X person has commented on X task, and respond to it in slack (by utilizing the thread chain design they have). I would also like to see something that connects perhaps conversations to certain groups or channels. It’s all about integrating the notifications.
The biggest value would be linking our company’s #1 communication tool with our #1 project management tool, and as everyone knows - communication is 90% of a project manager’s job I’d like it to be more seamless. I don’t want it to replace Asana, but I want it to serve as a prompt - maybe don’t have it be a full activity feed, maybe only send updates - outside of comments - every 30m or whatever interval people choose, so people don’t feel spammed or annoyed.
thanks so much, @Caisha! your comment on linking the #1 comms tool with the #1 product management tool is spot on. at the slack frontiers conference a couple of weeks ago, they characterized slack as application to use if you need to do something in under 2 minutes. anything longer (e.g., building projects/tasks) should be done using another tool - that’s what makes asana + slack so complementary!
there are a lot of things we can be doing to make the integration more robust and seamless.
We’d love to be able to assign a due date when creating an Asana task in Slack. Our team relies heavily on due dates to keep things on our radar (we mostly use Calendar view or List view ordered by due date, neither of which show tasks that have no due dates).
The ideal is: use Slack to assign concisely-worded tasks in Asana PLUS use Slack to explain/discuss the finicky details to clarify what needs to be done. We currently don’t use Slack to assign Asana tasks because we can’t assign due dates, so we go to Asana first and then come back to Slack. This is by no means a huge inconvenience, but since you’re asking…
Have not tested the integration in sometime. IIRC when we did it was so “chatty” that it was not usefuly (maybe we were not using it correctly).
options to choose “verbosity” level when Asana updates a slack channel (Task Completed, Task Created, Updated, Comment added, Date changed etc.)
I’d be happy just to have slack understand the name of the task when I post a link in slack.
Allow a defined slack channel to substitute for (run alongside) “Project Conversations” Asana. e.g. #projectname-abc is somehow displayed within projectname-abc conversations.
this is great! and something slack’s apis now enable (the ability to put a task, complete with details like due date) into asana. its something we’ll seriously consider as we think about moving the integration forward. thanks, andy!
thanks, mike! the notification thing is something we’ve heard before - ie too much “noise”. we’ll look into the ability for users to select which actions yield notifications (or reduce the net total to just what’s important).
I’d like to be able to convert Slack conversation into Asana Task with chat transcript as task details. I usually do this with Copy from Slack and Paste into simpleTextEditor, doing several Replacements to make text format properly, and that Copy-Pasting it again to Asana. This issue can be not Asana specific and can be addressed to Slack since it is Slack that has chat transcript DOM nodes badly lined up. But if Slack team can implement this better/faster, then that would be great.
The same can apply to Threads. I’d say converting Thread into Asana Task would be simpler, since in Thread you always have beginning and finite length (no need to guess, what should become part of task Description and what not.
This feature could add conversation/thread participants as task collaborators automagically, to be able to continue conversation in Asana.
Actionable Cards
Since slack implements now action buttons and does allow card updating, adding Complete/Uncomplete, Follow, Unfollow, Reassign buttons would be great.
Live Cards
Slack Cards can be updated. This allows card updating, in the case Asana Task had been changed after being placed in Slack chat. I.e. it would be great to have up to date Title/Assignee/Description/Due Date. PagerDuty has quite good example of such integration.
P.S. I tried to google dits of what I’d offered above and found that Trello already does a lot of that:
I’ve been using Asana for a couple months and I love the experience. Something was off though, I was receiving too many emails. That’s when I decided to use the integration with Slack.
I have less emails now. However, it’s really not effective for many reasons:
I’ve a #task-activities channels which sends informations about all the tasks being created
I receive message from Slackbot whenever there is a comment from me or others.
The thing is, I get notified each time I do something. I create a Task? I get notified by #task-activities. I add a comment? I get notified by Slackbot.
I’d love to see the Slack integration work much more like “My Inbox”. I could see items, archive them or comment to them right from within Slack (see Message Actions).
I want Slack to notify me when an action is needed on my part (not when I do something in Asana; of course I know that I added a comment).
I think the biggest win would be to play around who you mention in Slack. It’d make a lot of sense to mention the collaborators of a task (except the one who just did X).
Example: Task X is followed by Pierre, Jeremy and Arthur. When Task X is completed / commented by Pierre. Jeremy and Arthur are mentioned.
The first and main request: The main problem of current asana and slack integration as few people pointed out is that the notification of discussion in asana does not correspond to the notification of the person in Slack. It does passes the @ sign which does not ping the person in slack and adding this feature would be an amazing improvement to the integration. It would allow discussions on the tasks in Asana to be passed to Slack
second less important request) if it would be possible to change the assignment of people, change titles and add files as well as expend asana tasks discussions with the active buttons as requested by @Myroslav_Opyr it would be great as well as it will allow a more dynamic and seamless usage of asana and Slack platforms
third task, less important: internally in the company we use slackbot for reminders. I don’t know if it’s possible or not but if the assigned due dates in asana could trigger a slackbot to ping a reminder to the people assigned in the asana task it would be great.
Hi @Sharrifah,
Thanks for starting this forum. I just got Slack and plan to use it with my team in the new year, so improved Asana integration would be so helpful! We already use Asana and love it.
Some features that I’d like to see:
More customization options for notifications in Slack - right now there is no control over what types of notifications I get. I’d like the following options:
be able to disable all notifications from actions I take in Asana (for example, if I create/modify a task in Asana, I don’t want to be notified about it in Slack because I already know!)
customize the types of notifications - options for task created, modified, deleted, complete, etc.
specify whose actions I get notified about (example - I want to know about employees under me, but not necessarily all of my colleagues)
option to only notify about tasks that I’m following in Asana
Ability to more easily change/create tasks in Slack:
right now it only works with certain commands, which can be a bit unclear and hard to remember. It would be nice to have more Asana features within Slack to quickly make a post into a task, create a new one with date, assignee, etc.
Easier commenting on tasks within Slack:
I don’t use the Asana comment feature because then I have to check one more inbox. But with Slack, it would be nice to have comments better integrated so that all the chatter could happen there instead of only in Asana. It would be great to have a more built in way to comment on Asana tasks within Slack without using the commands.
We were originally very excited about it! The main issue we have is that Asana creates far too much noise in the Slack Channel.
For us, it’s useful to have the original creation of the task so people know something new pops up, however a new Slack message is created each time the task is changed, so we had to completely disable the integration as it became counter-productive.
Too bad. it’s really useful.
I’m trying to create a custom Zapier, but entering useful elements such as a clickable link to the task or the person seems to be a bit arduous than initially anticipated: any doc on that?
Agreed, I’ve also just enabled this and there is a lot of spam from tasks being edited. Really I only want the main operations with tasks (created, assigned, completed) to come through, otherwise there is too much spam in the channel.
This would be tremendously helpful for my team too. Currently we have notification channels that shows every update of every task in an Asana project. It has become so noisy that we have stopped using it. If there is a way to just get @mentions directly to the users slack channel, that would be fantastic.
so i have been using the asana slack integration, and seriously it makes me want to throw my comp out a window.
Far too many spammy messages, and no clear path to interact with lists within lists without a code that’s too long to be human usable.
I was initially hoping for a conversation channel connect, so that the slack channel and conversations were syncing. this was the best use scenario, so that when our team is working in asana, and the rest in slack; the conversations are synced.
there needs to be some way of configuring the granularity of comments the asana bot generates. I dont need to know everything about everything.
Here are useful notifications:
when a task completes (if its assigned to me)
when someone assigns something to me
Helpful developments:
slack channel user to Asana user connection within an asana project
slack channel to project conversation sync
a user friendly way to interact with sub tasks and sub-sub task
listing task paths from root level down eg taskname/sub/sub/sub
a way to then [add task] or [comment] to these sub paths