The Glean sidebar in Slack streamlines access to Glean for users who also use Slack. This integration allows you to open a Glean Direct Message (DM) directly from the top-right corner of your Slack interface. By clicking on the Glean icon, the Glean DM opens as a sidebar, eliminating the need to switch to the Glean web app or locate the Glean DM under Slack apps. This means you can ask Glean queries without leaving your Slack workspace.
Key Features
Glean Sidebar: Invoke Glean directly via the top-right corner icon; Glean opens as a sidebar. You can ask queries without going to Glean web such as : summarize this channel for the last 3 days, find a message in Slack, or any other general question.
Starter Prompts: Leverage starter prompts to quickly get to the most common queries via Glean sidebar.
Channel: When you open the sidebar while being in a channel, channel-contextualized starter prompts are available. The sidebar is aware of which channel the user was looking at when the sidebar was invoked. For example, in a channel called #industry:
DM: You can ask general questions and quickly get answers without needing a channel context.
Setup Instructions
Prerequisites
The Glean Slack connector should be set up.
Glean in Slack should be set up. If not, you can set it up via Admin console > Data sources > Slack > Glean in Slack
Determine Whether the Glean Slack App is Authorized
Navigate to Slack API Apps and look for the Glean Slack App. If you see it, proceed to the Enable Agent section.
If you don’t see the Glean Slack App, do the following:
Navigate to the Glean Admin Setup page and select the connected Slack datasource.
Select Authorize and complete the authorization process. Once finished, you will be redirected back to the same datasource setup page and see the Successfully authorized message.
Once the Glean Slack App is authorized, skip forward to the Enabling for End Users section. You do not need to perform the instructions in the Enable Agent section.
Enable Agent
From the Slack API Apps page, select the Glean Slack app
Go to Agents and Assistants in the features section and enable Agent or Assistant. Add the following details into input fields:
Description: “Quickly access and search across all your company's data”
Suggested prompts: “Dynamic”
Select Save.
In the features section, go to OAuth and Permissions and verify that
assistant:writeis present in the bot token scope. If not, add that to the scope.
Go to Event Subscriptions, and add the following two subscriptions to the Subscribe to Bot Events section:
assistant_thread_started
assistant_thread_context_changed
This can help provide contextual prompts in the sidebar going forward.
Perform the step appropriate for your Glean Connector type:
If your connection is a Slack2 Glean Connector, select Reinstall your app at the top.
If your connection is a Slack Enterprise Grid Glean Connector:
Go to OAuth & Permissions, you can see existing tokens. Because you made a change to the app, you must revoke and reset these tokens. To do that, scroll to the bottom in that tab, and select revoke tokens.
After the tokens are revoked, go to the Install App tab, and select install (both for the org and the workspaces where it is already installed). This will create new tokens with the right scopes.
Go to Glean Admin Setup, select the connected Slack datasource. In this page:
Select the Setup tab
Modify the Bot User OAuth Token field (only this field needs to be copied/modified using the value from the newly generated ‘Bot User OAuth Token’ shown in the previous step).
Select Authorize at the bottom of the page.
Enabling for End Users
Perform the following steps to enable the Glean in Slack for end users in your workspace/org:
Go to your workspace settings in your Slack workspace.
On the bottom of the page, expand App Agents and Assistants
Select the Show in top bar option to display the bot in the top right for all users.
Select Save.
Once complete, you’ll see an app icon appear in the top-right corner of your Slack desktop app.