Creating a Flexible Backoffice Tool in a Technical Company Using Slack

In the article, the author discusses the challenges faced when managing a Software as a Service (SaaS) product and needing to take administrative actions to assist users or help them debug issues. The author highlights that using built-in admin UIs like Django's can be helpful but also brings potential security risks. They then explore alternative solutions such as WYSIWYG back office tools, cloud-based managed tools, and self-hosted open source tools. However, these options have their own set of trade-offs and challenges. The author then introduces the concept of using Slack for administrative tasks due to its textual interface, access management capabilities, and ease of use for non-technical users. They explain how they built a slackbot called Backoffice Bot that handles various commands related to their SaaS product. The bot uses regular expressions to match commands and has approval flow features for certain destructive commands. Access control is managed by limiting the available commands based on the Slack channel, with separate channels for non-technical users and technical developers. The author concludes that using a slackbot for administrative tasks in their SaaS product has been well received by users and streamlined their workflow without introducing additional tools or processes to maintain.

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