Ontraport: Kisi + Slack Integration

In case you are interested in other interesting applications of our product, we suggest you check out our Kisi Applications page.

Ontraport is a software company with a range of SaaS products and relationship management software. With about 50 employees, this mid-tier software company specializes in marketing automation for e-commerce businesses. Jay Remotti serves as an IT manager, providing support for all of the company’s internal infrastructure, including for employees and campus security as well as digital security for nonclient-facing technology solutions.

Why did you choose Kisi initially? #

We implemented Kisi about three years ago, because of its fresh approach, competitive pricing, and API access. The blue lights on the readers are also on brand with the Ontraport colors.

You mentioned that you use Slack integrations in several capacities. Can you explain some of those features? #

In IT specifically, I have begun using it for monitoring certain things. For example, we have our wireless network (authenticated through user sign-in) so if someone tries to join our network or we’ve never seen that computer before we get alerts from that backend into Slack and we have our Zendesk account for internal IT tickets which publishes information into Slack and is integrated with our asset management system. So let’s say an employee of Ontraport has a Hewlitt Packard ProBook and submits a ticket to it to the help desk. Our Slack bots will figure out what machine or device was assigned and pull that info back into Slack and assign it to a ticket. The ticket contains whatever was written along with the machine name, which is almost always needed in order to help you with your problem.

We have a couple of other bots where you can type “OOO” and it’ll query a company calendar and list everyone who’s out of office and that happens with a bot. We have plans for another bot so that no matter where you are as long as the IT bot is invited into your online meeting room (i.e. Zoom, Slack, etc…) you can create a ticket for a command like “IT help” and it’ll create a ticket for you. Currently, you have to send an email for IT help, and since people aren’t usually sitting in their email all day (they’re in whatever their primary communication channel is), this bot could streamline workflow a lot.

Out of all the available project management tools, why did you choose Slack as your main resource? #

It was interesting because for product facing teams we use Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket and Bamboo. For project management, we were using HipChat and were deeply invested in that but then it was deprecated (discouraged from use) so Slack was almost like low hanging fruit at the time. We were right up against HipChat being deprecated and everybody on the team was already familiar with Slack so it was a no-brainer.

Are there any other departments in the company that use the Slack integrations? #

So far it’s been just IT and engineering that have built a couple of bots that do various things with their ticket queue in Jira. It’s a very ad-hock process. We’ve only been on Slack for 6 months but we launched an initiative recently to move the Slack integration development from individual teams and put it on the IT team. So moving forward we will make prototypes and take over launching integrations with Slack and whatever else needs to be done through IT so we don’t end up with disparate integration applications, teams using different programming languages, methodologies. It will be a monolithic restructuring of the way that we program and layout applications.

How do you envision a Kisi + Slack integration to streamline security in the office? #

I’d like to start with making a lockdown bot. Right now I use a couple of webhooks with Kisi to push unlock events into a room, so there’s a channel dedicated to monitoring a few different teams.

The managers asked me to help them report on their teams, with information about when they arrive at the office and when they leave. I set it up so that anytime there’s an unlock event it will automatically publish that event into a channel in Slack. Then it writes the event to a Google sheet so that the manager has access to that sheet to build fancier reports with it. Having a quick view by looking at the relevant channel in Slack is useful on a day-to-day basis. Next up I’d like to create a bot or ‘/command’ where anyone in our organization could write ‘/lockdown’ and have every door in the complex lockdown and we would have a manager be able to override that lockdown.

With Kisi we can order an export from the system that has all timed data, but if we could drop our data into Excel we can use our local time and put things into a tighter context.