Conclude Quickstart Guide

This quickstart guide takes you through a few easy steps where you will sign in to Conclude and deploy a custom app in less than 15 minutes.

Click Sign In at the top of this page to sign in. If there’s a Home button there, you’re already signed in and can skip this step.

After you authorize Conclude as a Slack app you will be redirected back to this page where you can continue with the next step.

If you’re having trouble with this step, check with your team admin. You may need to request approval to add Conclude depending on your team’s Slack permissions settings.

After signing in, you will be redirected back to this page to continue with the next step.

Open Conclude Home

Conclude Home is your Conclude command center in Slack where you can install and run apps, and view recent activities.

After you sign in you should see a Conclude Home button at the top of this page. If not, try reloading this page.

Click the button to go to Conclude Home, or locate Conclude in the Slack sidebar, under Apps. If you have problems finding Conclude Home in Slack, type /c home to get a link.

Conclude Home has four sub menus:

Dashboard displays recent activities, upcoming deadlines and urgent issues.
Activities contains a list of open and closed activities.
Apps shows information about installed apps, and lets you create new apps.
Help is a rich collection of documentation and resources.

Conclude Home will have an empty dashboard if you are the first person to use Conclude on your team.

Let’s create a custom app

We will create an app that helps us manage incidents that happen at our office, so we can become better organized and fix problems faster.

We want to be able to set a severity level to prioritize serious incidents that could block our work, and set deadlines for time-sensitive issues.

There are a few things you need to consider when deploying an app:

Where should you install the app? You can install the app in any private or public Slack channel. Create a new channel called #office-incidents or use an existing channel for testing (Tip: avoid #general and other crowded places.)

Which blueprint do you want to use as a starting point? Conclude comes with an incident blueprint that works well for all types of incidents. It will need just a tiny bit of tweaking to be perfect for your use.

Who should have access to the app? You can make it available to the entire workspace (global), or just to the people who are members of #office-incidents (custom). We’ll stick with the channel members for now, but you can change this later.

Install a Conclude app

In Conclude Home, click the Apps menu to go to the page where you can see installed apps, then click the Install App button. Alternatively, you can type the Slack command /c app install anywhere in your workspace.

Conclude will open a dialog that lets you install the app in two steps.

Step 1: Choose a channel, select the incident blueprint and set the type to global or custom.

Step 2: Change the blueprint’s default settings that works for your new app:

Give the app a name, for example “oops”.
Change the label, description and launch button text.

Click Install to complete the process and install your app in the #office-incidents channel.

That’s it. You have just installed a custom app, and the team can start using it right away.

Head over to Conclude Home > Apps to see your new app:

Using the app to report an incident

Anyone with access to the app can use it to report an office incident (global: entire team, custom: channel members).

There are a couple of ways to launch the app:

Click on the app’s launch button in Conclude Home; in the Dashboard or Apps page.
Type the Slack command /c oops anywhere in Slack.

When someone launches the app, it will show a modal view where the user can enter information about the incident.

Clicking Submit will:

Send an alert to #office-incidents about the new incident.
Create a dedicated activity channel #_office-incidents-1 where the team can focus on this incident.
Other incidents will get their own activity channels, #_office-incidents-2, #_office-incidents-3, etc.
Automatically invite everyone in #office-incidents (where you installed the app) to the activity channel.

The new incident will appear as a new activity in Conclude Home > Activities:

Click on the “Coffee machine broken” or the channel link #_office-incidents-1.

At the top of the activity channel you’ll find information fields (called attributes) describing the incident.
Click Edit to update any attribute.

Attributes capture important information about an incident; you don’t have to read through the entire discussion to get the big picture.

Aside from the live attributes, #_office-incidents-1 is a regular Slack channel where the team can discuss and resolve the incident.

After the team has concluded the discussion and resolved the issue, click Conclude and enter a conclusion:

Once you’ve done this, the activity will close and the channel will be archived. The activity will disappear from the channel list.
The app will send a message (alert) to #office-incidents, notifying that the incident has been resolved.
The closed activity is still available in Conclude Home > Activities and in Conclude Inbox.

Further customization and development

You can customize your app and add functionality by using the interactive no-code development.

For some advanced features, such as using triggers, you will need to edit the app code.

Here are a few ideas for further development:

Add an attribute where the user can specify the building or location of the incident from a list of choices.
Invite different members to the activity based on the building/location.
Send an alert to two managers if the severity level is ‘high’ or ‘critical’.
Only give certain team members the right to conclude and close the activity.
Change the activity channel name to something more intuitive.

Take a look at the developer’s guide to learn more.