Slack and Microsoft Teams alerts

Getting ratio and incident alerts into the chat channel your leads already watch.

For directors and administrators

What gets posted

Connect a Slack or Microsoft Teams channel and RoundUp posts two kinds of alert into it:

• Ratio alerts — a room is at risk or out of ratio. The message names the room and gives the number of children, the number of staff, and how many staff short it is.
• Incident logged — an incident has been logged at your center, with a prompt to open the app and review it.

Neither ever names a child. A chat workspace has its own members, retention and export settings that RoundUp can't see, so the detail stays in RoundUp and the channel only tells people where to look.

Where ratio alerts come from

RoundUp checks every room's ratio every few minutes on its own, and a room that tips into at risk or out of ratio sends an alert to directors' phones and to your channel. Nobody has to have the app open for that to happen. A director who does have Ratio Monitoring open also raises the alert straight away, which is faster; either way the same room in the same state is posted once, not twice.

A room that stays out of ratio is posted again on a widening interval rather than every few minutes, so an afternoon of being one teacher short doesn't flood the channel and bury the next new problem.

The channel shares alerts with more people; it doesn't replace someone keeping an eye on the rooms. See Ratios.

Before you start

• You're a director, assistant director or admin in RoundUp, and you can add a webhook in your Slack workspace or Teams channel.
• You've picked the channel. Make it a private channel of the people who can act on an alert — leads, floaters, the office. A channel the whole staff reads turns alerts into background noise, and one with people outside your center tells them about your rooms.

Each center connects one channel. Saving a new webhook replaces the old one.

Create the webhook

You make the connection inside your own workspace, so nothing is installed for your whole organization and RoundUp never gets access to read your chat.

Slack

Add the Incoming Webhooks app to your workspace, choose the channel, and copy the Webhook URL it gives you. The address starts with https://hooks.slack.com/services/. The Chat alerts screen shows the menu path when you choose Slack.

Microsoft Teams

Open the channel, choose ⋯ → Workflows, pick Post to a channel when a webhook request is received, and copy the URL it gives you at the end.

Connect the channel

1. Open Chat alerts In More → Marketplace, find Slack & Teams alerts and tap Connect.
2. Pick the service Under Where should alerts go? choose Slack or Microsoft Teams.
3. Paste the address Paste it into Webhook URL. RoundUp only accepts addresses that Slack or Microsoft create webhooks on, so a wrong one is refused with a message saying why.
4. Choose the alerts Under What to send, turn Ratio alerts and Incident logged on or off.
5. Connect Tap Connect channel.

Send a test

Once you're connected, tap Send a test message. It posts a sample ratio alert for a room called Sample room, whether or not ratio alerts are switched on, and tells you straight away if the channel refused it.

Do this before you rely on the channel, and again after anyone changes the webhook or workflow on the Slack or Teams side.

Changing or disconnecting

Open the tile again with Manage.

• Changing which alerts go out — switch them under What to send and tap Save changes. There's no need to paste the address again. With nothing selected, the screen warns that the channel stays connected but silent.
• Checking it's working — the top of the screen shows when the last message was sent. If one failed, you'll see Last attempt failed with the reason. Usually the webhook was deleted on the Slack or Teams side, and pasting a new address fixes it.
• Stopping — Disconnect channel stops alerts immediately. The webhook itself stays in your workspace until you delete it there, so delete it too.

More: All director guides