Custom Integrations

Integrate Workplace into your existing workflow with the power of the Workplace APIs. Custom Integrations are suitable for in-house development for your organization (or bespoke development for the sole use of a single Workplace customer).

Overview

Custom integrations on Workplace are services that use the Graph API and the Account Management API to extend the functionality of Workplace.

By building a custom integration app, you can keep employee information in sync with an identity service, automate group membership, make backups of posts in groups, or automate posting to specific groups based on activity in another service.

You can also use custom integrations to build group and chat bots that can communicate in groups on Workplace and in Work Chat.

Custom integrations are suitable for in-house development for your organization (or bespoke development for the sole use of a single Workplace customer). If you have a different purpose, e.g., offering a SaaS or PaaS integration to multiple Workplace customers, you should use Third Party Apps instead.

Access tokens generated for custom integrations are not linked to the user that generated the token. As a result, tokens are not expired nor rotated when users are removed or deactivated. Access tokens stay valid until they are rotated manually by a Workplace admin, or the custom integration is disabled.

Creating Apps for Workplace

The Graph API and Account Management API for Workplace are openly available APIs which can be called by any developer that knows how to call REST-based APIs. Access to these APIs is controlled by apps, with specific permissions and protected by access tokens.

Only System Administrators of a Workplace community can create apps and generate access tokens in that community.

Apps and Pages

When you create a custom integration, two objects are created:

  • An app, which has specific permissions as defined in the Edit App screen.
  • A page, of type 'Bot', which is only visible within your Workplace community. The page name reflects the name of your custom integration, and its profile picture matches the icon you chose when creating your custom integration.

A Custom Integration token is generated and shown to you when creating your custom integration, and this token can be used to read and write posts as your page.

Creating Custom Integrations

To create an app for Workplace, follow the steps below:

  1. In the Admin Panel, open the Integrations tab.
  2. Click on the Create App button.
  3. Choose a relevant name and description for the app.
  4. Add a profile picture for the app. This will be used any time the app is visually represented, for instance if it makes a post to group.
  5. Choose the required permissions for the app, based on the integration functionality you require.
  6. Copy and safely store the access token that's shown to you. You'll need this when making API calls.

Read More

To learn more about creating apps for Workplace, or to find out use cases for custom integrations, read the guides below.