Slack Hack: Getting SpiraTeam Updates in Slack

July 8th, 2016 by inflectra

Slack is a great communication tool for many businesses. This is in part due to the ease with which you can customize your Slack experience with add-ons, bots, and more. We wanted to share a quick hack for getting your SpiraTeam notifications to appear in your Slackbot channel, with links to take you straight to SpiraTeam to dig into the details

Get Your SpiraTeam Feeds On

Please Note: For this to work, SpiraTeam needs to be accessible outside of your internal network - so Slack can see the relevant feeds. This is automatically the case for all hosted customers.

This hack uses SpiraTeam's RSS features. There are lots of different feeds you can get access to in SpiraTeam. The only prerequisite is turning on RSS.

Go to your User Profile and make sure "Enable RSS Feeds" is checked, and that there is an RSS token shown in the text field below. Click "Generate New" if the field is blank and hit save.

First make sure that you have turned on RSS feeds

Now, when you go to "My Page", you should see RSS buttons next to a number of items. In the screenshot below you can see the "My Assigned Incidents" widget has an RSS feed icon.

On My Page find the feed you want to get notifications about

Right click on the RSS icon and copy the link address to the clipboard. We're now ready to head over to Slack.

Right click on the relevant RSS button and then click on "Copy link address"

Getting RSS in Slack

Log in to Slack and check whether you have the official RSS service installed by going to the Apps and Integrations management page--something like https://[yourslacksite].slack.com/apps/manage. If you see RSS in the list, you are good to go. If not, search the app directory for RSS and install it.

If RSS is not already installed, do so now

Once you have the RSS integration installed, it's time to start adding feeds. There are two ways to add any RSS feed to any Slack channel. The first is to paste the URL into the "Add A Feed" box on the main RSS Edit Configuration page.

you can paste a feed and pick a channel from the main RSS page

The second, 'slackier' way to do it, is to go to a channel and type /feed [url] and enter.

you can add a url to a channel straight from that channel

We recommend adding anything from "My Page" into Slackbot - a great way to get notifications about anything that has been assigned to you. Note that the RSS message is not as information rich as SpiraTeam's built-in notification emails, but is still really handy for those who live in Slack.

You can add multiple feeds to any channel, and using Slack's built in tools you can quickly add, view, or remove any existing feeds.

here's one I made earlier

We hope this was a useful little tip. If you are using Slack and SpiraTeam already, please let us know in the comments below. Also please share with us any interesting ways you are getting notified about events in SpiraTeam.

slack messaging rss newsfeeds

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