Luxurious life, a successful career and comforts were the thoughts that lingered in my mind as I stood among the toppers with my head held high and a B.E. degree with a well-paying job from an MNC in hand. Over 15 years, thoughts changed to family, kids, their health and education. These thoughts of a woman give rise to loving families and disciplined kids. But there was a fire deep within to implement the knowledge, to prove the caliber, to step back into the professional world. Many opportunities knocked my door (now an M.E. topper too) but I always dreamt of a job where I would not be forced to leave my kids at the mercy of domestic helpers at this tender age. Could there be a job where I could restart my career and yet attend to the needs of my family?

Luckily the answer was ‘yes’. When I received a work from home offer from ProDT Consulting Services with flexibility in working hours, I felt it was my dream job. But I was skeptical about the work from home culture, remote organization and administration. All my doubts were dispelled in the three months that I spent as a proud member of the ProDT team. I understood the power of Agile concepts & project management theories and witnessed their potential outside the books. I learnt here how a project can be planned and executed so efficiently using Jira stories and scrum calls, even when the team resides remotely throughout the country. Posting scrum message at the end of the day, which includes updates for the day, impediments faced and plan for the next day, helps the team to track the progress of the project. It also helps to understand the blockers the individuals are facing so that it can be resolved on time. Using WEM, a no code platform enriched with very powerful tools and functionalities, the projects are completed and delivered to meet the deadlines in few weeks (even days), as opposed to the traditional technology that would have taken months for the same project. As I unfold its new features every day, I realize how reusable components can prevent writing code from the scratch and save you a lot of time.

Using a new platform brings in lot of queries but when the CEO himself is so experienced and intellectual, and yet so down to earth, resolving doubts never seem tough. Moreover, the colleagues are always ready to help and are just a message away. Work from home has its own pros for me: no more hustle bustle in the morning, rushing to the office, scorching summer heats and drenched monsoons. It’s a good bye to traffic jams, umbrellas, raincoats and on the top of all to the anxiety about family and to the full day leaves when my kids are sick, as I can work at their bedside now.

ProDT, as its name suggests, enables truly digital transformation not only of the product and services but also of its team. It follows one of the core values of the Agile manifesto that states that individuals and interactions are over processes and tools. Every alternate Saturday, instead of working for the client, we work on ourselves by writing & sharing blogs and learning and implementing new technologies to transform into our better version both personally and professionally. Its humane to feel the gap sometimes as we work remotely and to miss the moments spent near the coffee machine where we would discuss our problems face to face or indulge in some gossip to relax in the break. To bridge this gap, a hangout activity is planned every fortnight where we switch on our cameras, play games, discuss the progress and future plans of the company and share our thoughts with each other. 'Happy team leads to happy customers' is what is followed at PRODT. I had a great time learning here in past few months and look forward to a long-term relation with ProDT.

Slack is today’s digital headquarter, where people across the world work collaboratively. Slack is an all-purpose communication platform which includes instant messaging, voice and video calling, and a suite of tools to help groups share information to work together. Slack has standalone applications for Windows, Mac, Android, Linux and iOS.

Slack Integrations‍

Integration is the process of enabling independently designed applications to work together by sharing processes and business data among each other. It is one of Slack’s most powerful features. Slack allows easy integration with other apps including Google Drive and Dropbox, to streamline file sharing. It uses a variety of bots to handle other tasks, such as pulling in data from external tools or creating quick surveys. These app integrations make the platform more versatile than other apps dedicated solely to communication. Thus, it saves time by streamlining daily tasks on Slack. The entire team can join video calls, manage their calendars and collaborate on files without switching tabs.

Slack is also designed to work with the internally built solutions and processes. Now users can integrate Slack with other applications to harness more value out of it. Teams can use it for creating workflows and bringing data from any application.  ‍

Benefits of Slack Integrations‍

Integrating Slack with an in-built application can improve communication among the team along, save a lot of time and boost productivity. When your app is connected directly to Slack, instead of logging into the app to complete an action, you can directly do the needful from Slack. There’s no closing down tabs or switching between applications. This feature provided by Slack could be used to:

• Benefit from continued use of an app while providing users with a slick experience inside Slack.
• Integrate your sales app to handle accounts more efficiently while spending less time doing so
• Directly access the messages on Slack when an event occurs in sales CRM
• Build and modify objects directly from Slack.
• Integrate your employee portal with Slack to send reminders to submit attendance which can be done directly through Slack without going to the company’s portal everyday in the morning, to apply for leaves or to receive pay slips.
• Integrate HR module with Slack to receive notifications about leaves, approve/decline leaves, generate pay slips or view dashboards and reports.
• Integrate Jira with Slack to monitor an entire project or an entire instance from within Slack
• Integrate Zoho CRM to manage sales, marketing, contacts, customer support and other business functions.

Integrate your custom app with Slack‍

Slack allows easy integration of your custom app to send direct messages to the private, public and direct channels of an organization's workspace.

The following steps give an overview of how you can easily send data from your custom application to Slack channels through your Slack App. Here, the application has been designed in the WEM Modeler.

1) First step is to create an app on Slack with the basic instructions provided in the documentations on Slack. The following credentials can be found in the basic information section of the newly created app.