Slack Connect Channels
SAM answers your team in a shared channel by default. Letting the other company ask is one command.
Beta. Shared-channel access is new, and the default is the cautious one.
A Slack Connect channel has two companies in it, so SAM treats the two sides separately:
| Default | |
|---|---|
| Your team asks, SAM answers | ✅ On |
| The other company asks | ❌ Off |
Guests read your answers either way.
Dana16:30
@SAM how many leads came through the demo form this month?
SAMApp16:30
In this channel I only take questions from the Acme team. You'll still see
my answers to them. Someone there can open it up to everyone here with
/surface shared open.
Opening a Channel
Run this in the shared channel, from your own workspace:
/surface shared openAnyone in the channel can now ask it things. To take it back:
/surface shared closeRun /surface shared bare and it tells you which state the channel is in, plus
both commands.
Invite SAM to the channel first with /invite @Surface Marketing Agent, or
open will tell you to. Only members of the workspace that installed the app
can run these commands.
What an Open Channel Does Not Grant
Guests can ask questions. Nothing they do outlives the conversation:
- ❌ Approving a change to your Surface data
- ❌ Teaching it anything: no memory, workspace or channel
- ❌ Starting a background job
- ❌ Leaving a schedule behind
Buttons carry the same rule. A click from the other side of a Connect channel (Approve, Save in Vault, Run in the background, Stop, Disconnect) is checked against who clicked it, not just against the channel.
Seeing What You've Opened
The Home tab lists every shared channel currently open, so you can find and close one months later.
An open channel means the other company can put questions to an agent reading your Surface environment, and the answers post in a channel they can read. Only open the channels where that is the point, such as a shared project channel.