An Alternative to VSTS App in Slack app store

Divya Vaishnavi

Slack is deprecating the Visual Studio Teams Services (VSTS) app from its app store. This app was built by the Slack team few years ago and provides basic integration between VSTS and Slack. The app allowed users to get notified on the events in Azure DevOps such as the creation of pull requests, updates to work items, completed builds and more.

Over the last past year, we have invested in this area and released a new suite of specific apps for Azure DevOps with enhanced capabilities than the older application.

In addition to receiving notifications on events from Azure DevOps, these new apps support rich features such as:

  • Creating work items using a command or messaging action
  • Approving / rejecting releases from the Slack channel
  • Notifying teammates with @mention support for action
  • Unfurling URLs for work items, pull requests and pipelines
  • Supporting notifications for new YAML based pipelines

Above all, team administrators can now create subscriptions so that they can get notified on work items, pipelines and repositories that are relevant to their team. For more details, refer the documentation here.

Next Steps

If you are an existing VSTS app customer we recommend that you begin using the newer apps as in few months the existing VSTS app will be decommissioned and would stop functioning.
These new apps are supported only on Azure DevOps Services. If you are on Azure DevOps Server (TFS) we have a work around detailed here which gives the same functionality as the existing VSTS app for Slack.

Please send us your feedback using the feedback command in the app or on the Azure DevOps feedback portal. Thank you for your continued use and support of Azure DevOps.

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