Slack Technologies Inc. this morning previewed new application programming interfaces for its platform that will allow information technology administrators to manage their companies’ internal chat channels with less work.

The first of the APIs focuses on external services. Slack has an ecosystem of over 400,000 apps and integrations that augment the platform’s native feature set in various ways, such as by enabling workers to pull up documents from a file sharing service without leaving the chat window. In the enterprise, information technology personnel must closely regulate what apps users install to ensure they’re not compromising business data or otherwise violating company policies.

The new API automates that task. It enables administrators to define app approval rules that Slack can use to allow or reject external apps without any manual input from the IT team. The API makes it possible to whitelist authorized apps and also allows companies to create broader approval rules, for instance a blanket policy that allows users to connect all cloud services listed in their firm’s software procurement database.

Slack is looking to simplify other aspects of IT teams’ work as well. The company is rolling out a number of additional APIs that make it possible to set up a new workspace, designate workspace administrators and invite users in an entirely automated manner. One early adopter, Oregon State University, has built a workflow that enables faculty members to create workspaces for projects on-demand by filling out a form.

In a break from the theme, Slack today also introduced the ability for users to turn regular chat rooms into what it calls announcement channels. These are channels that are dedicated to a specific subject, such as organizational news, and have restricted posting permissions enabling only specific users to publish messages.

Today’s feature announcement comes just over a week after Slack debuted a set of new security and privacy tools. Both updates target enterprise customers that have too many internal Slack workspaces to manage manually.

Slack is pursuing this aggressive feature release roadmap against the backdrop of growing competition from rival team chat services, most notably Microsoft Corp.’s Teams. Microsoft revealed last month that the service has passed 13 million daily users, while Slack reported in January that it had 10 million daily users. 

Photo: Slack