Building apps in Enterprise Grid

Slack Enterprise Grid allows large organizations to collaborate across many workspaces. While many apps, integrations, and bots will work as expected on Enterprise, there are enough new behaviors, conditions, nuances, and opportunities to warrant reviewing your app for full compatibility.

What is Enterprise Grid?

Enterprise Grid is a "network" of two or more Slack workspace instances. Each Slack workspace has its own ID, its own directory of members, its own channels, conversations, files, and zeitgeist. For the most part, each workspace behaves and acts functions as you're used to.

The biggest delta for your app, integration, bot, or mind to handle is that some channels and conversations can be shared between multiple workspaces within the same Enterprise organization.

As with typical Slack workspaces, workspaces on an Enterprise Grid have their very own application installations.

Why prepare my app for Enterprise Grid?

First things first: if you're used to calling a team's usage of Slack itself a "team" or a "Slack team", we now refer to them as workspaces. Workspaces are where work happens both in and outside of Enterprise Grid.

If your app or integration is never installed on an enterprise organization's workspace, you won't encounter any of the particularities detailed in this document.

However, if you have the good fortune to be installed by one or more Enterprise Grid workspaces, or a workspace you're already installed on becomes part of an enterprise organization's workspace:

🙃 Your app might not know what to do with messages and users originating from enterprise shared channels.

🗿 Your app may have trouble dealing with object IDs beginning with atypical characters, like user IDs starting with W.

👯 Your bot could blindly reply multiple times to messages, not recognizing a unique message delivery scenario introduced by shared channels.

🐋 Workspaces on Enterprise Grid are often large and some API responses, like channel memberships, can grow immense. Your app might need to change how it digests information.

You never know when a workspace on Enterprise Grid will install your app. Without making a few tweaks, your new users may notice these (and other) quirks in your app's behavior.

Enterprise Grid glossary

Though for the most part Enterprise Grid Slack workspaces are business as usual, there are enough new concepts introduced to warrant brief review:

• Enterprise organization - An entity introduced with Enterprise Grid to house multiple Slack workspaces. When a customer is using Enterprise Grid, all users and their direct messages are stored at the organization level.
• Enterprise organization user - A Enterprise Grid user. They have the same identity and profile across all workspaces within an organization.
• Enterprise user ID - A user ID beginning with U or W representing a user across all workspaces within a grid.
• Legacy user ID - Also known as a "team user ID", these are the User IDs you've come to know and love in Slack if you've only developed for non-grid workspaces before. They begin with U. Also known as a local user ID.
• Shared channel - A channel shared between two or more workspaces within an organization.
• Translation layer - A translating service that transparently converts new organization-based user IDs to legacy team user IDs, allowing apps to migrate data.
• Workspace - Where a team works. The terms, workspace and team are often used interchangeably. When you see the object name such as team_id, it means the ID for a workspace.

Surface area

Working with Enterprise Grid means that no matter what your app does or which APIs it uses, it's more likely to encounter an enterprise-related quirk.

Bot users are more likely than other integration points to require additional work for exemplary performance on Enterprise Grid workspaces.

We recommend reviewing your app's current assumptions, operations, and configuration. Maybe even if you aren't planning to work with Enterprise Grid.

Read on if:

• you are building Slack apps for your own Enterprise Grid workspace
• you're building Slack apps for other Enterprise Grid workspaces to collaborate with
• you're readying Enterprise Grid support for tools, libraries, or frameworks

Really, if you're using any aspect of the platform at all and want to support Enterprise Grid — this guide is for you.

Supporting Enterprise Grid in your apps

Different kinds of integrations with Slack will need to consider Enterprise Grid in different ways. If you still use the RTM API, for example, you will need to reconcile duplicate messages between multiple connected streams for each workspace in a grid.

But no matter which way you've built your app, the best thing you can do for yourself is use our migration.exchange method to update all records you have for an existing workspace with those from a grid. You'll then need not worry about a "translation layer" or maintaining two IDs for a single user.

Understanding enterprise shared channels

A shared channel is a bridge between teams needing to work together. Instead of endless email threads or sidecar Slack workspaces, teams can use shared channels to connect, chat, share files, and use apps with the same cozy ease they use communicating with their more immediate colleagues.

Life before shared channels

Maybe you're just learning about shared channels or maybe it's years from when this documentation was written. Hello, time traveler. In either case, let's rewind to life before shared channels to understand how they can make your working life simpler and more productive:

Before, when messaging was more limited, what our feline friends were saying and doing on the project that impacted these playful pups was a mystery. When the two teams tried to communicate it was disconnected, disparate, even duplicative.

This is now solved with shared channels. Now the project channel #projectM exists in each team's workspace (Catnip Inc. and Woof Inc., respectively).

To learn even more about how shared channels work, check out our resources on Apps for shared channels

Types of shared channels

There are two types of shared channels, each with different uses.

Slack Connect channels allow up to 20 organizations to come together in a single channel (e.g. Catnip, Inc. and Woof Inc. from the examples above).

Multi-workspace shared channels are shared between multiple workspaces within the same organization's Slack instance. For example, the #treats channel is shared in Woof Inc's, Marketing, Engineering, and Social workspaces. It exists in all three places, within Woof Inc.'s single Enterprise Grid instance.

A note on Enterprise Grid and your apps

Enterprise Grid functions a bit differently than you may be used to, especially where your app is involved. API responses may differ in Enterprise Grid workspaces, and your app will need logic to deal with things like semi-duplicate messages when it's installed on multiple workspaces within the same Enterprise Grid.

To walk through all the steps of supporting Enterprise Grid in your apps, check out this guide.

When workspaces migrate to Enterprise Grid

In most cases, an Enterprise Grid is formed by combining multiple independent Slack workspaces together. During this period of time where data is migrated and made compatible with Grid's organization structures, Web API calls, RTM API connections, Events API, and other platform interactions may be unavailable, both for users and your applications.

On the Web API, you may encounter the team_added_to_org error during this time.

Migration time varies depending team-to-team and organization-to-organization. Practice an exponential backoff strategy when encountering errors to help manage these periods by attempting connections at incrementally increasing rates: 1 second to 3 seconds to 10 seconds to 30 seconds to 1 minute, and so on.

To best plan for migrations, subscribe to grid-related app events as part of the Events API. Using these events, your app can pause and resume activity as appropriate.

• grid_migration_started
• grid_migration_finished

When migration is complete, use migration.exchange to receive global user IDs for any of your stored local user IDs and then turn off the translation layer if you haven't already.

User object changes

You'll find user objects on Enterprise Grid workspaces now have an enterprise_user attribute, containing a hash of additional context about the user in the larger Enterprise Grid organization.

You'll find:

• id - this user's ID, which might start with U or W
• enterprise_id - the unique ID for this particular Enterprise Grid organization
• enterprise_name - the name of this umbrella organization
• is_admin - a boolean value indicating whether this user administers this Enterprise
• is_owner - a boolean value indicating whether this user is the owner of this Enterprise
• teams - an array of team (workspace) IDs within the containing enterprise organization that this user belongs to

User IDs

Within an Enterprise Grid, all users have a single, global ID beginning with either the letter W or U.

We'll automatically convert references to a user's previous, pre-Enterprise-migration ID to their singular Enterprise ID. This allows your app to remain backwards compatible for users you've identified on a workspace before the days of Enterprise Grid.

Users created after a workspace became part of an Enterprise have no pre-Enterprise-migration ID.

Global IDs may begin with U or W. Historically, global IDs always started with W but that is no longer true. Newly created users will have a U user ID and that will be their global ID and they'll have no local user ID.

Use migration.exchange to gather all the divergent user IDs in a workspace and update your records. A single source of truth for user IDs in your systems will benefit you greatly and reduce complexity for you in the long run.

Translation layer

Slack Apps can turn on a translation layer in their app settings that will display "local" historical user IDs beginning with U for users that existing prior to a grid migration for a workspace the app was already installed on. It also lets you use these classic user IDs within a migrated workspace. It's meant to be used for a short while.

We strongly recommend you turn this translation layer off after using migration.exchange and going "wall to wall" with global user IDs, regardless of which letter they start with.

Building single-workspace apps

It's easy and secure to build Slack apps for your workspaces only. As with all Slack apps, installation and ownership of apps is on a workspace-basis. Single-workspace apps, as their name implies, are locked to a single workspace and cannot be installed across an Enterprise Grid.

Find out more in our single-workspace apps documentation.

Requesting a sandbox

Building properly for shared channels or enterprise grid requires experiencing the unique constraints and opportunities yourself.

If you don't already have access to a grid of workspaces, please complete the form below to request a sandbox. We'll get back to you as soon as possible.

Request a sandbox

To learn more about sandboxes and how to get started testing, click here.

Related reading

• Announcement about user IDs - Back in August 2016, we announced that user IDs may sometimes begin with the letter W and that it vaguely had something to do with our upcoming enterprise product. W is here to stay.