/whereis

Inspiration

Today, searching for where people sit and where conference rooms are in large companies is often difficult. We created /whereis to make employees more productive and efficient, helping them locate who or what they need quickly through Slack.

What it does

For any team using Slack, the /whereis command will allow employees to search for any indoor location within their company. For example, /whereis John Doe will map the current user to the exact office/cubicle location of John. This indoor map data is provided by Micello's private indoor mapping API.

How we built it

We leveraged the Slack Slash Command API and the Micello Indoor Maps API and built the web app in Django. Additionally, we used the Slack OAuth API to identify users and check that they have permission to access the private map data.

What's next for /whereis

We want to expand the usage of /whereis to not just be for people search within an office, but for searching anything indoors such as conference rooms. By integrating with other systems like Mail/Calendar, we can also send automatic meeting reminders with a ma and how to get to the conference rooms.

We can also scale this to do inventory and asset management for the location of certain vehicles for transit companies, the locations of shipments and items for import/export companies, and even go down to track smaller things such as the location of your phone or electronic devices. The business model is simple--charging companies a fixed fee per user per month to gain access to their corporate campus data through our /whereis integration.