How to test the Customer Slack App in a Sandbox Environment

Introduction

Two different Slack Apps are available with Thread.

• Internal Slack App - This is the app you deploy into your organization's (MSP) environment if you are using Slack as your internal collaboration tool. It allows you to interface with tickets and threads as the MSP and get updated when you are assigned to a ticket or in your channels through flows!
• Customer Slack App - This is the app that you can deploy to your customers' environments. It allows your customers to start chats and open requests with you. They will also get updated on threads in which they are a contact.

Because we are deploying two different apps, you are not able to deploy the customer slack app into your environment. However, you may want to test the customer experience before you deploy it to your actual customers.

If you want to deploy the Customer slack app to a test environment before you deploy to your customers, this article is for you.

Step 1 - Create a Slack Sandbox Environment

1. Navigate to https://slack.com/
2. Click an option to Sign Up.

   

3. Enter in an email that is not tied to an existing Slack account and click Continue.
   We recommend setting up a free gmail or other free email account to use for your sandbox environment. Just choose something you can use for testing.

   

4. Once you have set up your account, click Create a Workspace.
5. You will be asked to perform a quick setup.
   1. Enter the name of your fake company and click Next.

      

   2. On step 2 click Skip this step.
   3. On step 3, enter whatever you want.

      

6. Congrats! A Slack sandbox account is set up. You can now add the customer Slack app to this tenant.

   

Step 2. Deploy Customer Slack App to Sandbox

Now that we've set up a Slack sandbox environment, we can deploy our Custom Teams app to the environment.

1. Navigate to the Thread Admin Panel -> Clients.
2. In the Admin Panel, select the client you want to use for this test. Since we are setting up a sandbox environment for testing, this should not be a real customer of yours.
   Service Bot field for the customer you intend to deploy should be empty. You can only deploy one bot per customer.
3. After selecting the client, navigate to the Teams/Slack Connect tab.

   

4. Select Slack and click Continue.
5. On the following screen, you will be presented with a couple options:
   1. Email Invite - Use this option when you don't have admin access to the Customer's Slack environment, and you need another Admin to help complete the deployment. They will receive a link via email which will walk them through the deployment steps.
   2. Magic Link - We will choose this option since we have admin access to the Slack environment that we will be deploying to.

      

6. Click Copy link to copy the magic link.
   The magic link will expire after 15 minutes so act quickly or go back to the previous page and start again.
7. In a guest browser window where you are logged into the Sandbox Slack environment you created in Step 1, paste and navigate to the magic link before it expires.
8. Slack will ask you to approve permissions for the bot, click Allow.
   1. Custom app example:

      

   2. (default) Chatgenie app example:

      

9. You successfully deployed the app, you should see a success message.

   

10. Next, navigate back to the Slack Sandbox environment. The app should be installed in the Slack workspace. If the app does not show in the list of apps, go to Add app and search for Chatgenie to add it manually.

    

11. Under the Chatgenie app (or if you have a custom app, the custom app name), you can test the client experience by creating new threads and testing chat and other bot capabilities.