Improve Slack / Confluence integration pipeline

Previews of Confluence pages don't show up in Slack automatically because users have not authorized it. However, it needs to be authorized on a per user basis. Even if you whitelist Confluence in Slack, it still requires tokenized authentication.

1. User created a public slack channel
2. User pasted the URL of a unrestricted Confluence page from our instance into the new channel
3. Slack responded with a preview of the page.

This is the expected behavior if a user has already completed the Confluence-Slack integration.

Test with new user

I performed this test on the machine of one of my coworkers. She's neither an Admin in Slack nor an Admin in Jira/Confluence.

1. create a public channel
2. paste in a confluence URL
3. get prompted to "link account"
4. go through the linking process. she was able to do this but it's a ton of steps
5. back to Slack to try again now that the user was authenticated in Slack
6. finally, the preview shows up successfully

How can we improve this experience? Pre-auth? No-auth?

This is too many steps for users to go through if we want them to see Confluence URLs in Slack.

Suggestions to improve work flow

• Allow for users who have never set up the app integration before to provision it directly from Confluence or Slack
• Allow the applications to implicitly trust each other and generate the link automatically
• Other solution which removes end user confusion (reduce amount of clicks and interaction dialogs to complete integration)