If your company uses Pipeline Assistant, you can also work on your pipeline by asking the Cinode Chat Agent in Slack or Microsoft Teams. This article explains what you can ask, who is allowed to do it, and what happens afterwards. It assumes Pipeline Assistant and the Chat Agent are both set up. For how rules work, see Pipeline Assistant.
Note: These pipeline actions appear in the Chat Agent only when Pipeline Assistant is installed for your company. If the Chat Agent says it cannot do this, ask your administrator to check that Pipeline Assistant is installed and connected.
Who can do what
The Chat Agent identifies you from your verified Slack or Teams account and checks your Cinode access level every time. The table shows who can use each action.
Action | Who can use it |
Move a project to a stage | Managers |
Set a project's status | Managers |
Undo a stage move | Managers |
Run the weekly digest now | Managers |
Subscribe or unsubscribe yourself to pipeline alerts | Any user |
View the current rules (read only) | Cinode administrators with the Flows permission who can also edit this integration's rules in Cinode Flows |
A manager is a user with the Company manager access level or higher. A manager can change any project that Pipeline Assistant can reach. This is not limited to the manager's own teams or customers.
Move a project to a stage
To move a project to a pipeline stage, name the project and the stage. For example "Move the Northwind platform project to Negotiation." The Chat Agent finds the project, makes the move and confirms the stage the project ended up in.
The final stage can differ from the one you asked for. When a project enters a stage, your "enters the stage" rules for that stage run, as if a person had moved it. If one of those rules moves the project on, the Chat Agent reports where it finally landed. The chain stops after 5 moves in a row.
Set a project's status
To change a status, say for example "Set the Northwind platform project to Won." You can choose Open, Won, Lost, Abandoned or Suspended. Your "status changes" rules run only if the status really changed. The Chat Agent confirms the new status and how many rules matched, how many sent a notification and how many changed the project.
Undo a stage move
To put a project back, say "Move it back to the stage it was in before." The project returns to the stage you name or the earlier stage the Chat Agent knows about. Undoing a move does not run any automation rules, so nothing else changes. Pipeline Assistant does not add an Undo button to its messages.
Run the weekly digest now
To get the digest without waiting for Monday, say "Run the pipeline digest now." The digest then goes to each recipient exactly as the scheduled one does. If a digest completed in the last 30 minutes, the Chat Agent tells you it ran recently and does not send it again. On a company with many projects, the Chat Agent may take longer than its own time limit to answer, while the digest still completes.
Subscribe to pipeline alerts
Any user can say "Subscribe me to pipeline alerts." After that you also receive the real-time notifications from rules that use the "project is updated" trigger, in addition to what the rules send to their own recipients. If you are already a recipient of a rule, you do not get a duplicate. Say "Unsubscribe me from pipeline alerts" to stop.
A subscription does not include status, stage or role notifications, or the weekly digest. The list holds up to 500 subscribers. When it is full, the oldest subscriber is dropped, and the Chat Agent tells you when the limit has been reached. Your email address comes from your chat account. If the chat platform shows no email for you, the Chat Agent cannot subscribe you.
View the rules
A Cinode administrator with the Flows permission, who can also edit this integration's rules in Cinode Flows, can ask the Chat Agent to show the current rules, for example "Which pipeline rules are set up?" This view is read only. The Chat Agent cannot create or change rules. Rules are edited on the Rules page of the configuration wizard in Cinode Flows.
Good to know
An action can be refused. If the project does not exist, the stage does not exist or Cinode does not allow the change, the Chat Agent says the action could not be completed. Check the project and the stage name, and try again.
Edits at the same moment. A chat action and a person editing the same project at the exact same moment can overwrite each other, because Cinode saves a whole project at once. This is rare.
You can stop the messages. Pipeline Assistant's direct messages end with "Sent for Pipeline Assistant". Each kind of message, for example real-time alerts, the weekly digest and nightly reminders, can be paused or stopped separately. Ask the Chat Agent to list your integration messages and stop each one you do not want. A kind can be stopped once it has sent you a direct message.
If something does not work, see Pipeline Assistant: Troubleshooting.