Use Slack As a Content Source

Search public and private Slack conversations from a SearchUnify search client by setting up Slack as a content source. This article walks you through the process.

PERMISSIONS.

You can only crawl the channels you have access to.

SearchUnify supports channel-level content permissions in Slack.

Establish a Connection

1. Navigate to Content Sources.

   

2. Click Add New Content Source.

   

3. Find Slack from the search box and click Add.

   

4. Give your content source a Name and click Connect.

   

5. In the window that has popped up, select a workspace and click Allow. Only the messages, links, and attachments in the selected workspace will be indexed.

   

6. Click Next.

   

Set Up Crawl Frequency

The first crawl is always manual and is performed after configuring the content source. In Choose A Date, select a date to start crawling; the data created after the selected date will be crawled. For now, keep the frequency to its default value Never and click Set and move to the next section.

Select Message Fields and Channels for Indexing

message is a Slack object. It is used to store comments, commentCount, authorEmail, messageUrl and several other properties of a Slack conversation. You can choose to index all of these properties, or some of them. It is recommended to index all properties.

1. Click to select message properties for indexing.

   

2. Use or to edit or remove properties and click Save.

   

3. Navigate to By Channel.

   

4. Use the index to find your channels, check the box in Enable column to index them, and click Save.

   

Based on your crawl frequency settings, your Slack workspace is indexed immediately after you click Save or it might take longer.

After the First Crawl

Return to the Content Sources screen and click in Actions. The number of indexed documents is updated after the crawl is complete. You can view crawl progress in in Actions. Documentation on crawl progress is in View Crawl Logs.

NOTE 1

Review the settings in Rules if there is no progress in Crawl Logs.

NOTE 2

For Mamba '22 and newer instances, search isn't impacted during a crawl. However, in older instances, some documents remain inaccessible while a crawl is going on.

Once the first crawl is complete, click in Actions open the content source for editing, and set a crawl frequency.

1. In Choose a Date, click to fire up a calendar and select a date. Only the data after the selected date is indexed.

   

2. Use the Frequency dropdown to select how often SearchUnify should index the data. For illustration, the frequency has been set to Weekly and Tuesday has been chosen as the crawling day. Whenever the Frequency is other than Never, a third dropdown appears where you can specify the interval. Also, whenever Frequency is set to Hourly, then manual crawls are disabled.

   

3. Click Set to save crawl frequency settings. On clicking Set, you are taken to the Rules tab.

   

Data Deletion and SU Index

A method to update the index in real time is to enable event subscriptions, which supplement existing crawls and synchronize data between your Slack instance and SearchUnify in real time. Check out Enable Event Subscription in Slack