Slack and Microsoft Teams: alerts to your team, not a customer channel

These two are different from every other connection on this site: they do not talk to your customers at all. A Slack or Microsoft Teams connection is a one-way alert into the channel your team already watches, so that a visitor asking for a person, or a new request arriving, appears where somebody will see it within a minute. Both are built and available once the platform has verified Allinaa; neither has been verified with a real workspace yet.

Why alerts rather than another inbox

Most small teams do not watch a second tool. They watch the one channel where work already happens. The failure a chatbot creates is not a bad answer - it is a request that sits unseen for two days because nobody had the panel open. An alert in the place your team is already looking solves that without asking anybody to change their habits.

It is deliberately one-way. You cannot reply to a customer from Slack or Teams, and that is a design decision rather than a missing feature: a reply needs the conversation, the record and the delivery ledger behind it, which is what the cabinet inbox provides. The alert's job is to get somebody to open it.

What gets sent

• A visitor has asked for a person. The alert that actually matters, because it is the one with a human waiting at the other end.
• A new request has arrived, so the team knows there is something in the inbox.
• A connection has a problem - a credential has expired or been revoked - so a silent channel outage is noticed by a person rather than by a customer.

Each alert is sent once per event per connected channel, so a flapping connection does not fill your workspace.

What is deliberately left out

This is the part worth reading before you connect one. A Slack or Teams channel usually has more people in it than should see customer detail, and often includes guests. So the alerts carry:

• No customer name, e-mail address or phone number.
• No private notes your team has written on a conversation.
• No clickable customer links, and text is escaped and defanged so nothing a visitor typed can become a link or a mention in your workspace.
• No channel-wide or here mentions, so an alert cannot notify your whole company at three in the morning.

The alert tells you that something needs attention and where to open it. The detail stays behind your team's sign-in, which is where the permissions are.

How connecting works

Both use the platform's own incoming-webhook mechanism, which is the documented way for an outside service to post into a channel. In Slack that is an incoming webhook URL for the channel you choose. In Microsoft Teams it is a Workflows webhook - the "send webhook alerts to a channel" template - and your tenant administrator may need to allow the Workflows app first. The retired Office 365 connector URLs are refused outright rather than accepted and then silently failing.

You paste the URL in the cabinet. It is encrypted, never shown again, and the host is resolved and pinned so the destination cannot be redirected elsewhere. An optional test post confirms it reached the right channel. If the webhook is later deleted in your workspace, the next alert fails in a way that marks the connection as revoked, and you are told.

Which channel to point it at

Point it at a channel that a person reads during the hours you promise to answer in, and not at a general channel everybody has muted. A dedicated channel with two or three people in it works better than the busiest room in the workspace, and it also keeps the alerts away from guests and contractors.

Limits, stated honestly

• Not verified with a real workspace yet. The code is tested against simulated endpoints; no Slack or Teams workspace has been connected in production.
• No buttons or cards you can act on. The Teams message is an adaptive card and the Slack message is text; neither carries an action button, because an action taken from a workspace without a signed-in account has no accountable actor behind it.
• No health heartbeat. There is deliberately no periodic "still working" post - it would be noise in your channel. A dead webhook is discovered on the next real alert or by pressing Test.
• Alerts are not a record. The conversation, the request and the audit trail live in the cabinet; a deleted Slack message changes nothing.

What to use today

Request notifications already arrive by e-mail, and on Premium a request can be assigned to a named team member. If Telegram is where your team actually talks, that channel is live-verified and can carry the same kind of attention. See Telegram, the inquiry inbox and the channel overview.