Surely, this "feature" is something we, the "community", have been imploring from your team. Your "annocumnet" genuinely captures the essence of how keenly you've been "listening" to us, your customers.

It's about time you altered your thought "send" for the sake of your devoted users.

For more read here

Neat! But I can't get the recipient to work when sending to a user, rather than a channel. When using a static option (only Airtable users are selectable) or when using a dynamic option ("Created By" field, tried user email and user name), sending a test message fails and the Recipient in the output is blank.

I'm able to send to a channel no problem. 

Are the groupings of buttons only clickable once? I designed a test & sent it to our Org-Wide Airtable Slack channel to have our 90 some users test it, I set the button to ultimately increment up a number field as if it was a 'poll' and only the first individual who touched the first button was allowed to trigger the button action. All other users who attempted this afterwards had sent me a direct message saying it wasn't working. The first individual couldn't hit the second button either, after it recorded the first button press - the second button was no longer triggering the action to increment up the second number field.

@Chris_Ferrer I'm curious, why do I not have access to this feature/automation node?
Seems a little strange to publicly announce a feature (I found this via linkedin) and then not have users be able to access it.

@LearningAgent 
Unfortunately thats been a significant communication issue of theirs since their org changes earlier in the year

Product Releases can be found here: https://www.airtable.com/whatsnew

Most of the announcements these days are product features & usually will be availed to enterprise customers first, or are beta signups. 

Would really like to see actionable emails built in a similar way. We have a lot of non-employee volunteers that would never use Slack, but do use email.

@Jack_Manuel Thanks for your comment! Are you still running into this issue. If so could you send some screenshots and DM me the applicationId so we can have the team investigate further? I tried running the scenario you mentioned using the Created By field with the user ID or Email Address, and it worked for me 

@LearningAgent Are you still not seeing "Actionable Messages" under the Slack integration. The feature has been rolled out to 100% of customers. 

@Joe_Svingala Only the first user's response will be recorded. This is helpful feedback, and something we'll keep in mind as we explore future improvements. 

Excellent. Can we expect a similar function for Teams?

@Chris_Ferrer no appears to be resolved now, thanks.

Really excited for this!

However, it seems like there's a bug or unexpected behavior with scheduled automations. If a previous automation run is still awaiting a response on the Slack message, the next run will fail to send to Slack at all- the "Recipient" field is mysteriously missing, even if it's configured as a static value (in this case, a public channel). 

For our workflow, we need the latest task information sent to Slack, where the end user can complete their task and then mark it as done with the actionable button.

Mine is failing when using slack IDs - it works with email. It previously worked using slack IDs before it was actionable...

Loving this feature! So much fun. One teeny ask - when will we be able to add a bot name and icon for actionable messages the same way we can with non-actionable messages? This may sound like a small thing, but we use these fields extensively to communicate different actions (for example, we use the thumbs-up icon to indicate approval). It really helps when scrolling through a Slack channel to be able to differentiate between different types of notifications. Please and thank you!

@Chris_Ferrer 

This is an awesome feature and I've already built out a bunch of automations using it and keen to get it implemented into our approvals process.

But I'm having an issue with the actionable messages "expiring".

After about 5 minutes once the automation has run and the slack message has been sent, if it hasn't had a response yet it cancels the step and is unable to update the record from slack.
This is what it looks like in airtable.

And when you action the message in slack after 5 minutes has elapsed you get this message "The automation that sent this message has been canceled or deleted."

Is this a bug or do I have to change something about the automations?

Thanks in advance! Keen to see the potential of this.

@pascalm 

You’ve hit upon one of several limitations with this feature. One limitation is that the links expire after 7 days (they definitely shouldn’t be expiring after 5 minutes). Another limitation is that only logged-in Airtable users who have editing access to the field can perform the action. Another limitation is that the actions can only be performed once. The full list of limitations are outlined in this support article.

The solution & workaround to all of these limitations is to simply send your own custom links to Slack by using Make’s custom webhooks, which then will trigger whatever actions you want in Airtable using Make’s Airtable automations.

I give detailed step-by-step instructions on how to accomplish this in this episode of the BuiltOnAir podcast. In the podcast, I discuss doing this with email, but it’s the exact same process with Slack.

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consulting — ScottWorld 

Thanks @ScottWorld,

Shortly after I posted that comment the issue with it cancelling after 5 min was obviously fixed and it no longer does that. I haven't tested it for longer that 7 days too.

The permission limitation is also very much an issue for me. The reason I was so excited for this feature was to enable my employees to update relevant information.

But I'll definitely try it on Make. Thanks!

Which fields do the buttons work with? When I connected a button to an open text field it just cleared the text when I clicked the button. I would love to be able to update an open text field by clicking on a button.

Can we get access to the response when an action is taken? For instance if someone clicks the 'Approved' button in your example, I want to know the slack userID of that person so I can update the record on button click. It would be an addition to the dynamic fields available in the record update UI that follows the button action. I would add a Response packet Item under the "Use Data From.."

Hey @Chris_Ferrer , my team and I have been using Slack Action Message automations from Airtable for the past 1-2 weeks so far.

The biggest *issue* we see is that when any one Slack user in that channel clicks on any of the action buttons, there is no *immediate* feedback to the channel about the fact that this button was clicked (and by whom).  I'm pretty sure Slack has a way to support that -- where after clicking a button, all other buttons grey out and Slack adds something to the message to indicate *who* clicked the button.  That would really help make this an excellent feature -- as it stands right now, we can't really use this automation for any serious operational workloads, because of this current limitation.

If this fix is already in the works, can you provide a rough ETA as to when it might be resolved?

Unfortunately, Airtable doesn’t yet offer that functionality, but you may want to email support@airtable.com to request that feature. 

In the meantime, I would recommend using Make’s Slack automations to do a variation on that.

You can create actionable URL links in Slack using Make’s custom webhooks, and then you can post a message to the channel after the action was taken.

I give a demonstration on how to do this (in the context of email) on this Airtable podcast episode, but you can easily modify my demonstration to work with Slack.

You’ll also need to know how to instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable, which I explain at this link.

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld