Sadly third party apps need to be approved by a slack workspace administrator. I wanted to use wee-slack[0], but neither my work nor any of the community slacks I’m a member of, e.g. kubernetes, had any third party clients enabled at all.
I figured the likelihood of an admin enabling it at my request was zero so I didn’t bother asking.
That's how it should work. Slack offers APIs, and the administrator of each instance controls the level of access you get to them. Remember that the data in Slack doesn't belong to you, but rather is the property of your employer.
Oh i totally agree! It’s just unfortunate that it means a tui slack is not a possibility, even for slacks that are fully public.
My company also does not restrict slack on unmanaged devices so its not like they’re mitigating data exfiltration meaningfully. But, even with such a lax policy, officially sanctioning a third party app has implications.
Then Slack doesn't have an "open" API as I described, at least not one that's a first-class citizen alongside their Electron app (or the app-dot-slack-dot-com equivalent). I can either use my own client, or I can't, for the purposes of addressing my "I'm tired of dealing with whatever UX Slack's designers mandate I have" complaint.
I used to use wee-slack, then I worked places that wouldn't allow its installation, and then suddenly I kinda wished work cultures would just move back to emails, mailing lists, and some light ephemeral thing for IM (quite possibly IRC). Because at least then, user experience doesn't have to be dictated by someone who has absolutely no idea how you want to or like to work.
> move back to emails, mailing lists, and some light ephemeral thing for IM (quite possibly IRC). Because at least then, user experience doesn't have to be dictated by someone who has absolutely no idea how you want to or like to work.
Not sure if you have used corporate email in the last 15 years but admins do absolutely dictate what clients you can or cannot connect from.
I have worked for exactly one company in my entire decade-ish long career that mandated how I connect to email / disabled IMAP, and have exceedingly little patience for places that would disable IMAP without strong reason (for example a law firm or health care company, I could understand, but for the vast majority of companies? A policy mandating that laptops and phones must be encrypted at rest and locked with secure passphrases is going to do more than mandating that I connect to the Gmail web interface rather than the Gmail IMAP interface from the same exact machine on the same exact network - especially if "app passwords" to bypass 2FA have to expire periodically, which I'd also find reasonable)
I managed O365 for my last employer and we enforced exchange login. Granted we were part of the defense industrial base and would fall under your exceptions, certainly. But, if a company is making even a minimal effort to prevent company data ending up on unmanaged devices its a nobrainer to disable imap, as much as it sucks for the end user.
In the end we did have to make singular exceptions for certain developers because outlook’s absolutely pathetic plaintext support was causing issues when they were contributing via the LKML. But that was a significant business justification as opposed to a workflow optimization.
