SnowSync

Project Overview

SnowSync was born from a simple frustration: different teams using different chat platform (MS Teams, Slack, etc.) can’t communicate with eachother. As a Data Science consultant it was common for me to respond to clients across 4 different chat platforms, resulting in missed messages or delayed responses. I built an MVP product that solves these challenges by bridging Slack and Microsoft Teams. It allows you to message contacts across organizations and apps almost seamlessly by securely copying messages, photos, reactions and threads between platforms.

Together with my cofounder Max Seifert, we received 50k€ from AWS First Incubator to build out the project.

Challenges

• Lots of hacks and workarounds were needed to get the apps to talk to eachother.
• I broke my leg partway through the MVP but still finished it from my hospital bed in time for demos
• I found a (known) bug in Microsoft’s Bot Framework and had to patch it

Technical Implementation

The MVP consists of an entirely serverless javascript app that listen to events from the Slack and Microsoft Teams APIs. Messages are translated into a common internal format and forwarded to other platforms via their webhooks. Secure connections between organizations/teams are established directly from the app via generated codes.