Controlling which users are able to take which actions is no simple task. Building this into Slack has always been an interesting challenge. In large

Role Management at Slack

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2021-05-24 10:00:03

Controlling which users are able to take which actions is no simple task. Building this into Slack has always been an interesting challenge. In large enterprise organizations, the standard types of roles we offered to customers were too broad, and delegating a generic admin role can grant someone with too much power — what if you only want a specific user to be able to manage specific channels? When you make them an admin, they are able to perform a wide variety of actions beyond the scope of the intended purpose, and can view dashboards and see information that is unrelated to managing channels. We needed to build a system that was more flexible and allowed for granular permissions. We’d like to share the problems we were facing with roles, the solution we implemented, and our plans for the future.

We needed a granular roles system to break down the core abilities of the generic admin users. Additionally, we needed to make sure the existing roles worked alongside this new system.

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