It’s been a while since last time I wrote an update on new Spark Army Knife features, and I have added some really cool ones lately!

You find a complete list of commands here.

Note! Many of the Spark Army Knife commands can be run in a group room, and the output is sent to the 1:1 room with the Army Knife bot. In addition, the command is deleted to avoid cluttering the group room.

Information about rooms

You can use /listfiles, /listmembers, and /listroom to get (in the 1:1 room) more information about a room. You can get a list of all the files posted to the room (instead of scrolling back) with /listfiles, and /listmembers csv gives you a comma-separated list of member email addresses (very useful for sending out emails to people in a room). The /listroom command basically prints out all the meta information available on the room (whatever Spark offers). It also offers a hidden gem: it prints out the web URL for the room.

Add or remove groups of people

I sometimes want to make sure that a group of people are members of a room.  A team in Spark allows anybody in the team to join themselves, but often people miss new rooms that are created, so by adding them you make sure they see the new room. I thus added a /team command to create teams, add all the members to a room, remove all the members, as well as sync the room membership with the team.

The easy way to use it is to do /team init my_team in a room with the people you want to make a team out of being members. Then you can use /team add my_team in any room to add the same set of people. Replace add with remove, sync, or verify to: remove the entire team, sync the room’s membership with the team’s members, or check the difference in memberships between a team and the room’s memberships.

Further management of the team can also be done in the 1:1 room with the /manageteam command (like adding individual members, list the teams you have and so on).

Ensure that you know a person is lurking…

If you, like me, has external participants in some of your rooms (like consultants), you will also sometimes want to remove them, but it is hard to know if you have covered all the rooms. I thus made the /checkmember <email>|<name> command that allows you to search for a partial email or name and get a list of rooms with that person as a member. So, /checkmember Greger gives me basically a list of all the rooms I’m a member of 🙂

The list includes the Spark id for each of the rooms as well, so you can use the /deletemember command to remove a person from one or more rooms (/addmember can also be useful!)

Keep yourself and your team focused with /topofmind

One of the ways I like to stay focused on the most important goals of the week is to maintain a Top of Mind list with my five+ most important things to accomplish the coming week. Every morning I try to review the list and update it. To simplify this, I created the /topofmind command (works in the 1:1 bot room). It can be used to maintain a simple list of items to remember: /topofmind 1 Prepare for the Friday workshop. Just /topofmind gives you the current list, and you can delete items by doing /topofmind 2 delete (to delete item number 2). There are also commands to insert items in a numbered list (and push the others down), clear the list, and create a personal title.

You can also do just /tom as a shortcut and /tom help to get help on the command. The /topofmind reminder on command is pretty cool: it will send you a reminder with your list every day at this time (in the 1:1 bot room).

I realised also that my team members would benefit from knowing about what is important to me, so I created the @mention /topofmind command (and just /topofmind in a 1:1 room) so that anybody (also people who are not Army Knfie users) can get that person’s top of mind list. And even better, if you are an Army Knife user, you can do /topofmind subscribe in another user’s 1:1 room and start getting real-time notifications on all updates to the top of mind list!

I hope you enjoy the Spark Army Knife and remember that you can recommend the Army Knife to your friend myfriend@somewhere.com this way:

/recommend myfriend@somewhere.com Hey check out this cool app!