In this post, I will explain why you may want to register with Slack and the additional features and opportunities this brings. 

Firstly, I will assume you are familiar with Slack. If not, in short, Slack started as a novel way to  communicate with colleagues, and quickly become a collaboration platform for all kinds of enterprise activities. If you haven't done so already, you can register for a free Slack account at slack.com

Historically, the de facto way of communicating with colleagues was via email. If you wanted to send a message, share a document, have a conversation with a group of people, you would email them and then trawl throw various threads of subjects and conversations. Also, you would regularly not be included in a topic you were interested in - or get spammed with unwanted information. 

The Slack user interface made all that much easier - and frankly ... a lot more fun! And as its popularity increased, other features were added and integrated ... like the ability to start a video conference with everyone in that channel at the click of a button. Soon, people were spending so much of their day on Slack, that 3rd party vendors created integrations so users could do all their daily activities (like booking meetings, assigning tasks, managing projects, etc.) all from the Slack user interface. 

kippy comes with Slack integration. When you register to kippy with Slack, you can create and join 'communities of interest'. These communities are formed around arbitrary collections of KPIs and kippy automatically create a Slack 'channel' which you and colleagues can join and collaborate through. For example, you may want a channel that is interested in all the KPIs related to employee morale, regardless of which team or objective they are modelled in. 

Any changes to these KPIs, whether changes in forecasts, new actuals or notes and attachments, are automatically published to the Slack channel. Users can then discuss, collaborate and action activities based on that ... and because you are now in the Slack ecosystem, you have access to a plethora of Cloud collaboration tools on the Slack ecosystem. See https://slack.com/apps for more info. 

The other reason to integrate with Slack is to have more control over which users can access your kippy instance. By registering to kippy with your corporate email address, this ensures that only people with access to emails from your company's email domain can register and be invited to your kippy instance. 

However, if your organisation has many different email domains, you can register via your Slack account. This also gives you a much easier way to invite someone external to your kippy instance, without having to set them up with a 'corporate' email address on your email domain. 

This is very useful if you want to temporarily add some consultants to help you set up kippy - or if you want to integrate to your corporate logins (e.g. via Single Sign On). Or, if you are a consultant, and want to register before asking the client to set you up on their email domain or with a personal email address (e.g. hotmail, gmail, yahoo, etc.). 

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By the way, you can flip your registration between Slack and non-Slack logins if you change your mind. 

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Finally, a quick note on 'Aliases'.

By default, kippy only allows the addition of users to the same email domain as the System Owner. This is to ensure that you information is only shared with people inside your company.

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However, there are scenarios where you may want an external user to have access to kippy. This is usually for an external consultant who is helping you set up.

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In this case, you can give a user an 'alias' email address, which will be copied-in on all emails sent by kippy to that user.

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For example, Bob is an external consultant who has his own email address at small-consultancy.com, but not at your-big.org.

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You can create a kippy user with the email bob@your-big.org - and an alias of bob@small-consultancy.com.

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All the messages that kippy would normally send to bob@your-big.org - will now be sent instead to bob@small-consultancy.com.

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So to invite bob, as a system owner:

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1) Invite bob@your-big.org using the Invite icon

2) Go to Settings | Users | Edit user and select bob@your-big.org

3) Enter the Alias bob@small-consultancy.com and save.

2) Go to Settings | Users | Reset password for user and select bob@your-big.org

3) Kippy will send an email to bob@small-consultancy.com - showing him how to login and reset his password. 

I hope this helps - any questions - please contact us via the Live Chat or at support@kippy.me

Thanks,
Nauman
CEO and Founder
kippy - performance management ... made simple