Integration with Slack is one of the key reasons why companies continue to migrate to the growing chat platform.   Recently Slack shared some metrics on their growth and it continues to be impressive with 8 million daily active users spanning 500,000 teams with 3 million paid users.

To date Slack has done the best job of promoting integration as a key differentiation in the platform and developers continue to release apps to help integrate Slack with many different platforms.

The competition is growing in the space with offerings from Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Atlassian looking to capitalize on the success of Slack.  These platforms have a varying degree of integration support and promotion of integration but all continue to iterate to bring more value to their chat platform.

One of the most common integrations for teams of all sizes is a connection with Agile development tools.  This suite of software solutions help teams running agile processes to spit projects into sprints and activities into tasks and sub-tasks.  Keeping everything organized is a key tenant to success in Agile development and a number of platforms exist to help the process.

A few of the most common platforms are Atlassian Jira, Trello and Asana.  Each has its own advantages and disadvantages and work best for teams based on their maturity and complexity.   In all cases however the integration with chat platforms is a critical aspect of keeping everything moving.

When chat platforms are integrated with development tools the process moves faster because everyone stays on the same page and users don’t have to constantly switch between apps losing precious time.

When looking for a slack jira integration there are a few options for teams to consider:

• Jira Cloud by Atlassian – this free plugin allows Jira Cloud customers to get ticket information when issues are mentioned.   It will find issues in chats and automatically expand information about the ticket.
  • Advantages: Free
  • Disadvantages:  Single Feature, Only available for Jira Cloud, Requires configuration for each channel.
• Jira Server Alerts – this plugin utilizes web hooks in Jira to push updates to channels when updates are made in Jira.
  • Advantages: Free, Available for Jira Cloud and Server
  • Disadvantages: Only pushes information from Jira to Slack – no other features
• Slack Jira Integration – This plugin also known as Jira Integration+ represents a premium alternative to free solutions.  It is targeted towards teams that want to do more with integration with Jira and comes packed with many more features then the free alternatives.
  • Advantages: Full integration with Create, Assign, Transition, Comment, Edit, Schedule, Log Work, Notifications, and more.
  • Disadvantages: Premium service at $0.50/user/month
• Jira Server Slack Integration – Teams running a self-hosted Jira Server solution should not feel left out when it comes to Slack integration.  This solution offers the same deep integration available for Jira Cloud teams and is compatible with Jira server versions released after 2016.
  • Advantages: Fully featured, Compatible with behind the firewall solutions
  • Disadvantages: Premium service

For teams using Trello the official integration between Slack and Trello is likely the best bet.

• Slack Trello Integration – this plugin offers a deep integration between Trello and Slack and mirrors many of the features that Jira Integration+ offers with it’s Slack to Jira integration.
  • Advantages:  Fully featured
  • Disadvantages: Utilizes a power-up which effects Trello pricing

If Asana is your Agile platform of choice the official offering also looks fully featured.

• Slack Asana Integration – Allows users to take action directly from Slack.  Users can creates issues, add comments, etc right from Slack.
  • Advantages:  Fully featured
  • Disadvantages: N/A

When looking at the options available for integration with Slack it is clear there are many good choices to keep your agile process moving.  All provides with fully featured solutions are touting the prevention of context switching and streamlining the process.   As hundreds of thousands of teams utilize these solutions and continue to write positive reviews it is clear that at least some of these promises are being delivered.

What do you think?  How does your team integrate your Agile tool with Slack? Any solutions missing from my list?

PS – For those looking for a Jira Stride Integration that works with Jira Cloud and Server check out Chat for Stride from Nextup.  It appears to be a fully featured integration and will likely gain some traction with Jira Server teams looking to migrate from HipChat to Stride.

Now in beta release Chirpy.ai provides a native solution for collecting NPS scores from users of bots across Facebook Messenger, Slack, Stride, Microsoft teams and more.   The solution includes pre-built integration for botkit and SDKs and APIs for custom integrations.  With Chirpy you can track NPS feedback from customers interacting with your AI and bots.  Just a few lines of code get you started.

Found a great plugin for connecting Slack with JIRA.  There are a few different options out there but this is the only one I could find that connects Slack to JIRA via a bot integration framework.  This bot was recently updated to allow logging time, commenting, assigning, watching JIRA issues directly from Slack.

Let me know what you think – Slack JIRA bot

Setting up Sonos Playbar with Samsung Smart TVs.

The Sonos system for surround sound via the playbar with a sub and some play 1s or play 3s for rear surrounds provides a nice wireless setup for surround sound.  Pair this with a 2016 Samsung TV like the KS8000 or KS9000 and you have a nice setup.

If you figured out the universal remote solution you may have been running before with macros and series of commands is no longer needed you are probably as excited as I was.   Now you finally have a single remote that everyone can use and seamlessly controls all of your devices.

The problem occurs when you setup the Sonos playbar and try to use the Samsung remote to control the Sonos volume.

Don’t fret, there is a solution that works… but before we get there lets cover some of the misinformation you will find along the way.

#1 Sonos will point you to invalid help pages (as of September 2016)

This link – https://sonos.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/2424/~/configure-sonos-playbar-with-samsung-smart-remotes

• It will tell you the setup is simple, just connect the IR adapter that comes with your TV and your RF signals will be repeated via the INCLUDED IR repeater and everything will work fine.
• The problem is Samsung no longer sends an IR repeater, go ahead – dig in your box, you won’t find it.

#2 Forums will say its possible and also that its not possible

#3 You will consider sending the Sonos back…

#4 Hopefully you find this page or figure out the link below yourself.

The best answer to be found online before this post is here – https://en.community.sonos.com/home-theater-228993/using-samsung-smart-touch-remote-with-playbar-6735082/index1.html#post16032764

• A nice fellow named Buc_Nasty lays this out pretty well.   This is how I figured it out.
• This post uses the power of the inter web to show you pictures and helps with the setup of Direct TV, Apple TV, etc along with the analog input shown by Buc

How to setup Sonos Playbar with 2016 Samsung TVs

Please follow these steps exactly, don’t guess ahead or assume you know then comment it does not work.  It does work if instructions are followed.

Setup your Sound System on the Samsung

1. Go to Source the box with the arrow pointing in. 
2. Select “Universal Remote”
3. Select the choice “New Device”
4. Select “Home Theater System”
5. Select the Brand “Bose” – I know its not a Bose, do it anyway.
   
6. Select “Optical” as the port
   
7. Press the “Power Test” button and say “Yes” – It won’t turn off your Sonos – don’t expect it to.
   
8. You should end up with something like this where your devices are listed and also “Bose”
   
9. CRITICAL – On the TV go to source and select TV (like old school TV as shown) as the input.
10. Part 2 – On the Sonos App.  Go to the hamburger menu and “Settings”
11. Go to “Room Settings”
    
12. Select “TV Setup and Control”
    
13. Select to “Replace Current Remote” OR “Add new Remote” if you don’t already have one setup. The Sonos App will now ask you to press the volume up button. Press on the Samsung remote.
    
14. Success – you should now see the Sonos light up when you press the up or down button on the Samsung remote.  Now lets tell the TV to use the Sonos for sound on your devices.  You will need to repeat the steps below for each device you would like the sound to be played via Sonos.
15. Go back to the “Universal Remote” input like step 2.  Find the first TV source you want to change.  In this case Direct TV.  Press UP and select “Use with Home Theater”
    
16. The name will now change to -Bose like shown below “DIRECTV-Bose”, lets edit the name to make it just Direct TV.  Select this input and press Up to find “edit”
    
17. Alter the name and remove the -Bose
    
18. Result
    
19. Now the Samsung will find “DirectTV” and automatically add the icon back.
    
20. Select your next input device and select “Use with Home Theater”, change name, etc
    

At this point your Samsung remote will control the volume via the Sonos Playbar and you can still maintaine the single remove dream.

Hope this helps someone.

Recently my team decided to try out Slack as a replacement for Skype messaging that we use on a daily basis.   Our reasons for looking for a replacement are likely similar to many other companies but here are a few:

• Skype call quality diminished after recent upgrade
• No ability to message a specific user in a group chat
• No integration with our various other tools
• Private chats where access only provided via invitation

We have been keeping an eye on Slack and have been interested in watching it develop and grow in the typical SF venture funded model.  Until recently our team resisted the move due the lack of a calling feature on Slack. We tried other tools for calling but could not find a good replacement for Skype.  Without a reliable calling option we simply could not leave Skype and felt the team was unlikely to want to run Skype and Slack at the same time.

When Slack announced the calls beta  we decided to give it a try and have had good luck.  The calls feature was a pre-requisite to our migration to Slack – now that we are moving the real benefits of Slack are starting to appear.

Integrations

Slack recently announced an app store for applications and bots that integrate with Slack and provide enhanced features.  The program is backed by Slacks venture partners (Accel, Andreessen-Horowitz, Index Ventures, KPCB, Spark, and Social Capital) in the tune of $80M in investment in Slack App companies.

Our team immediately searched for a plugin/bot that would provide the following things:

• Detection of Jira Issues mentioned in chats
• Automatic retrieval of issue data
• Automatic link to the task in Jira

This feature was something that we really liked when we had a trial of HipChat, Atlasssian’s answer to Skype and Slack.  The hipchat tools integration with Jira made it a really compelling offer, we ultimately decided to keep looking due to the lack of calling and higher price tag of HipChat at the time.

Our team has conversations that go like this very frequently:

• Bob: What are you working on today?
• Susan: I am stuck on MCS-1023 and then I am going to work on MCS-1033
• Bob: Ok, let me take a look

In this case Susan is referring to a Jira issue by its ID in Jira.  This is the most common way we refer to issues and it ties into our wiki, bitbucket, branches, test plans, etc.   The current process would require Bob to go into Jira and find MCS-1023 or create a link by knowing the structure of the Jira ticket URLs.   The process probably takes 10 seconds but happens 100s of times a week.

The other issue is that other team members in the chat won’t go look up MCS-1023 and don’t really know what Susan is working on unless described on the daily scrum.   They may have unique insight that could help Susan from being stuck if they only knew what MCS-1023 was.

Our initial search for this plugin surprisingly returned no results.  There is a plugin that pushes Jira updates into Slack  but is a push methodology where updates in Jira create posts in Slack.   We were looking for mentions in Slack and info from Jira. Honestly we were surprised not to find this plugin.

One of my team members dug a bit deeper and found on GitHub a MIT licensed piece of code that appeared to do what we wanted.   They then setup node.js on their local machine, worked out some bugs, figured out how to connect and configure and was able to get a sudo functional version for our team.

The open source code needed more work to be a commercial offering.  It was lacking OAuth based integration for both Slack and Jira and needed deeper integration but was a great starting point.   At this point the team member decided to spend personal time to build out the bot and recently announced an open beta with a functional solution.   Our team has been testing with it and we are super excited to see where this goes.  I have also discussed Slack with other organizations during “conference season” and found a number of teams looking for this same feature.

Check it out if you are interested in a bot that integrates slack with jira feel free to take a look and join the beta group.  He told me he is going to accept the first 100 or so teams to determine if it makes sense to continue work on the bot.

In addition to the jira bot for slack we have found a number of other interesting Slack Apps.

Here are a few:

• New Relic – Alerts and notifications from our application monitoring and performance tool
• Giphy – A fun app that pulls in animated GIFs that prove to be hilarious
• PagerDuty – ITOPS alerts, scheduling and incidents

Summary

After a long look and careful consideration we are going full steam into Slack based communication.  I will attempt to keep this site updated with our progress and results (so says the guy who has not posted since 2012).

I recently migrated from my 17″ MBP to the new retina macbook and noticed that the battery life was not what I was expecting. The retina macbook seemed to be running hot and that battery would drain far quicker than expected.

After a bit of Googling I found some discussions on the Apple forums around a hung “dock” process that can get left over after migration assistant runs. In my case I used a time machine backup to restore to the new Retina Mac so I decided to take a look.

I pulled up the activity monitor (global search for activity monitor) and sure enough I had a “dock” process running 100% of one of the cores. I took a look at my battery and had 75% power and 1:35 remaining (of course this is not what is expected with a new MBP).

If you see the same issue on your machine follow these steps to kill the dock process

1. Open terminal
2. Run the following commands (hit enter after each one)


cd ~/Library/Preferences/
rm com.apple.desktop.plist
killall Dock


The dock will disappear for a second and then come back and the process should be remove from your activity monitor. As soon as I ran the commands the system slowed down and the CPU usage went way down. As I type the battery says 64% and 3:12 hours – much more like it.

Hope this helps someone.

Hi everyone,

I had a request today to to add WYSIWYG support to the transactional emails section under “System” > “Transactional Emails”.

It appears that it is pretty simple.
1. Add the Fonits WYSIWYG Editor Extension (free) – http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/fontis-wysiwyg-editor.html
2. Add the transactional emails text editor Text Area CSS ID value in “System” > “Configuration” > “Admin” > WYSIWYG Editor – the value is template_text
3. Save the config

You should how have WYSIWYG editing ability in transactional emails.

NOTE: You can also watch this Video for this info – http://vimeo.com/4316043

Does it work for you?

Download this free extension from Magento Connect here:  Remove or Change States and Regions

This extension lets you hide certain states on the front end to prevent customers from selecting them during checkout, estimate shipping, payment, etc. One common issue that many users of Magento (Community and Enterprise) is the list of states (regions for non-US) displayed to customers during checkout, registration and estimate shipping. When Magento is first installed a number of items exist for the United States that are not commonly shipped to or need specific shipping rules.

States commonly excluded from Magento stores:

• Alaska
• American Samoa
• Federated States Of Micronesia
• Guam
• Hawaii
• Marshall Islands
• Northern Mariana Islands
• Palau
• Puerto Rico
• Virgin Islands

In the case of my medical supplies business we had flat rate shipping to the lower 48 states from our supplier and were charged very high rates to ship to Hawaii, Alaska and other US territories and military locations.  We wanted to handle shipments to these locations offline to ensure we did not lose our shirts on shipping.

One way to achieve this is to modify the collections.php file here (created local version):  /app/code/core/Mage/Directory/Model/Mysql4/Region/Collection.php to alter the regions array returned.  If you like getting into the code and want to redo this update when you upgrade Magento this might work well for you.

There is now a FREE way remove displayed options in shipping and billing in the administrative interface via a new extension.  The “Remove or Change States and Regions” extension is the first extension developed in a joint venture between my company and Eltrino consulting (a team of Magento Rockstars based in Keiv).

Video Demonstration

Instructions for use:

Here is how it works:

1. Download and install the extension from Magento Connect
2. Once installed a new menu item appears under “System” > “Configuration” > “Sales” with the title “Region Management”



3. After selecting “Region Management” the configuration screen is displayed.   Click “New Region Configuration” to add exclusions for a Country (multiple Countries can be configured by adding additional configurations.



4. Use the “Common Settings” select option to pre-select certain common settings or select specific values based on your needs.  The options here will be modified based on customer requests but to launch we will be providing the following options for the United States:
   • Lower 48 States – Excludes military locations, US territories and Alaska and Hawaii
   • 50 States Only – Excludes military locations and US territories
5. Save your updates and clear the Magento Cache (System > Cache Management > Flush Magento Cache).
6. Check your customer website and the excluded options will be removed.

The extension effects the system in the following ways:

• Excluded States or Regions are removed from all Store Views and Websites
• Excluded areas are not displayed as options for billing address, shipping address, estimate shipping and customer registration.

For customers who want further flexibility we are going to offer an enhanced version which allows these values to be specified by store/website and for each area (IE – allow Hawaii for registration but not for shipping address).   Please contact me if you are interested in this enhanced version and would like to give input on features and functions.

Download this free extension from Magento Connect here:  Remove or Change States and Regions

The extension is compatible with Community 1.4 – 1.6 and is currently under review for a Trusted Extension for MagentoGo.  The extension is also upgrade proof and will be modified if needed for future Magento versions.

Please let me know what you think in the comments area below.   If you have ideas for additional extensions you would like to see from the NjcMedia & Eltrino partnership please let me know.  We have around 40 extensions in mind which are all coming soon…

Hi everyone,

One of my major Magento Enterprise customers just launched the onestepcheckout extsion – http://www.onestepcheckout.com as an A/B test with the existing multi-step checkout process. We are using Google Website Optimizer to test the variations and I will have some data starting today.

I will update this post with results of the test. I know others have experienced a lift with this extension and I am excited to see how it works for us.

Here is a quick post found on the keynote site on how to remove keynote sessions from Google Analytics. We recently added GA to the Ford site I run and wanted to exclude our monitoring visits to get real results.

Just implemented as suggested in this post: http://blogs.keynote.com/the_watch/2011/09/filtering-out-web-performance-monitoring-traffic-from-google-analytics.html

As the post notes it does not apply to historic traffic so I guess I have to wait until tomorrow to see if it really works.

Thanks Keynote!