Slack Technologies, Inc.

Salesforce, Inc.

Pranay Agarwal

Prajna Shetty

Hye Jung Choi

Salman Suhail

Andrew Fong

Michael Deng

Stephen Sowole

Tolga Akin

Bruce Sullivan

Patricia Ang

Diogenes Brito

Allen James Ferrick

Kefan Xie

Jason Norris

Edward Ishaq

Michael Demmer

Kevin Marshall

Techniques for enabling access to external data of a user for facilitating communications via a communication platform are described herein. A user of the communication platform maintains external data with a third-party service provider. The communication platform receives, in association with a user account of the user, an indication of intent to grant the communication platform access to the external data and an authorization code (the 'code'). The communication platform later receives, from the first user account, a request to access the external data. For example, the request can include an input corresponding to an intended recipient of a message. In response to the input, the communication platform sends a request, with the code, to the third-party service provider to obtain contact data associated with the intended recipient and causes the contact data to be presented in association with the message, such as in a 'To' field of the message.

Integrating external contacts in a communication platform

Various embodiments of the disclosure are directed to updating a selected group-based communication interface of a plurality of group-based communication interfaces with an application dialog received from an external application. In an example, user interaction data associated with a group-based communication system can be received from a client device, and a triggering event, associated with an application external to the group-based communication system, can be identified from within the user interaction data. An application dialog request, associated with the triggering event, can be sent to the application and, in response to sending the application dialog request to the application, an application dialog can be received from the application. Based at least partly on a determination that the application is validated for communication with the client device, the application dialog can be output to the client device for display via a group-based communication user interface associated with the group-based communication system.

Triggering event identification and application dialog validation

A group-based communication platform can present, via a client device of the group-based communication platform, a user interface that includes a user interface element, interaction therewith, invoking a command associated with an external system. Based at partly on receiving an indication of an interaction with the user interface element, the group-based communication platform can cause payload data to be provided to the external system, wherein the payload data is associated with an indication of the command invoked via the interaction. Based at least partly on causing the payload data to be provided to the external system, a response to the payload data can be received and an interactive dialog can be presented via the user interface. The interactive dialog can be configured to prompt a user of the client device for data to be provided to the external system for performing a processing action associated with the command.

Systems and methods for initiating external actions via a group-based communication system

A group-based communication platform is configured to initialize processing actions executable via validated external resources. Moreover, the group-based communication platform may recommend specific processing actions to a user based at least in part on the user's activity in interacting with the group-based communication platform (e.g., via a client device), wherein such activity may be represented as environmental contextual data. Moreover, once the user selects a particular processing action for execution, the group-based communication retrieves at least a portion of the generated environmental contextual data to be passed to the validated external resource for use in executing the selected processing action.

Systems and methods for initiating processing actions utilizing automatically generated data of a group-based communication system

A group-based communication platform may be utilized to execute one or more processing actions via respective external application systems based on messages exchanged among client devices via the group-based communication platform. A particular processing action may be executed for a particular message by generating a container including contextual data and payload data, wherein the payload data comprises the message for which the processing action is to be performed. The container is provided to the external application system via a proxy endpoint, thereby causing the external application system to execute the processing action based on the data included within the container.

Various embodiments of the disclosure are directed to updating a selected group-based communication interface of a plurality of group-based communication interfaces with an application dialog received from an external application. User interaction data may be generated based on group-messages in group-based communication channels of the selected group-based communication interface. A validation server parses the user interaction data received to identify a triggering event associated with the external application by comparing the parsed user interaction data with a triggering event registry. The validation server then sends a trigger token to the external application associated with the triggering event. In response to receiving the trigger token, the external application sends the validation server application dialogs and/or dialog validation data that is authenticated and output for rendering to the selected group-based communication interface.

Validating application dialog associated with a triggering event identification within user interaction data received via a group-based communication interface

Growing community of inventors

San Francisco, CA, United States of America

Pranay Agarwal